Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 2ND - 8TH NOVEMBER 2018 | 7 Interview L ord Hutton is nursing a black eye when we meet. It wasn't, says the staunch New Labourite when probed, the result of an altercation with fans of opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. "I don't think they care about me now: they probably would but I'm out of the political fray and don't intend to get back into it," he says. The peer, who was widely regarded as one of Tony Blair's most loyal supporters, held a series of Cabinet posts towards the end of New Labour's ten years in office. The shiner, he explains, is the result of a tree-felling accident at his home in Cornwall. He had been clearing ground to make way for a wildflower meadow he is creat- ing on the smallholding the house sits on. He'd been working with a couple of friends who had le Hutton to split the felled logs on his own. "I was kit- ted up with all the chainsaw gear on. I've been using chainsaws for most of my adult life: what can go wrong? Quite a lot it turns out," he says One of the logs spun off and smashed into his face, leaving the mesh visor a mangled mess. "It happened so quickly. All I knew was that my head was on the ground," he says. When he came round, Hut- ton was spread-eagled on the ground, 20 minutes walk- ing distance from his house with a broken cheekbone but thankful that he still had his sight. It's been an eventful month chez Hutton. Aer this interview he is due to go to Colchester to see his infant grandson who has just been in an accident with a cyclist. This domestic drama comes at a time when he is winding down as chair of the Nuclear Industries Associa- tion in order to free up time for the same role at Energy UK, which he recently took on. Lord Hutton has remained closely involved with the energy sector since leaving the House of Commons at the 2010 general election. His last role in government was as secretary of state for business, which incorporated energy. While in the role he pushed through the govern- ment's last energy white paper, which was chiefly nota- ble for putting nuclear power back on the agenda as part of a broader push for a decarbonised generation sector. He concedes that the topic was far from the top of his agenda when he became an MP in 1992, but says over- seeing policy in that area gave him a powerful sense of its importance. "If we don't have a clean, affordable, reli- able energy system we can pretty much give up any aspi- ration we have as a country and an economy," he says. "We are very much at a crossroads in the energy sector. A lot of the good things that happen don't get the attention they should – we have done some amazing things." Hutton says that it you examine the original plans for decarbonising the power sector, the reality has exceeded expectations. "If you said to me in 2007 that in a few years there would be days when we were not using coal, I would have thought you were out to lunch, and of course now we are looking at a completely coal-free sector. "We've done the most extraordinary things and we are on the cusp of extraordinary transformations in how we generate, distribute and trade electricity that will knock the socks off anything we have seen in the past ten years." Progress has been smoother in some areas than oth- ers, though. One example of an area that has been less smooth is the smart meter rollout. "It's a massive undertaking so it's no surprise it's taken longer than we thought," he says. Another is carbon capture and storage, where he admits to a "slight concern" about the recently pub- lished report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli- mate Change (IPCC) about reliance on this still unproven technology to compensate for overshoots of carbon emis- sions in other areas. "We are still in the foothills of getting our heads

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