Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 13TH - 19TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 7 Interview E nergy is close to Mike Clancy's heart. The Prospect general secretary's engagement with the sector started exactly three decades ago when he joined the Engineers' and Managers' Association (EMA) as a rookie researcher a•er completing a postgraduate degree in industrial relations. He stayed on when Prospect was formed a•er the merger of the EMA with the IPMS union in 2001, ris- ing through the ranks to be elected to the top job at the union in 2012. Utility Week meets Clancy less than a fortnight a•er the 9 August blackout that le• hundreds of thousands of homes cut off and sparked Friday night travel chaos. The passionate Everton FC fan is reluctant to be drawn into outlining the union's response to Ofgem's inquiry into the causes of the blackout. Clancy, who was re-elected to head Prospect in 2016, explains that he doesn't want to prejudge the verdict of the engineering experts in the union's membership. But he agrees with the emerging consensus that the big issue raised by the event is the scale of backup gen- eration that society wants. "It's woken the public up to something that they took for granted which is security of supply," says Clancy. That in turn raises questions about how the transmis- sion system can be incentivised to deliver a higher level of resilience, he says: "That will have a cost, particularly in a market environment." But he doesn't see eye to eye with his counterparts in the trade union movement, who seized on the outage as an opportunity to make the case for renationalisation of the grid. "This isn't something to play politics about," says the law graduate, whose union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, unlike its counterparts in the energy sector. "If you make energy policy on the basis of partisan politics, you will have a suboptimal policy: energy policy should be based on the physics and engineering." And Clancy parts company with his fellow union bosses by highlighting the risks involved in bringing energy back into public ownership. "A transition to public control may be fine in terms of some of the principles but could be very, very choppy in terms of outputs and objectives." In particular, he worries that the drive to decarbonise the energy mix could be imperilled by a protracted row about ownership. "If you can achieve the changes we think are neces- sary for the sector without miring the sector in an enor- mous row about appropriation of assets, that would be wise." Any future government seeking to decarbonise the energy system should ensure that the owners of the existing infrastructure are onside rather than becoming mired in such a row, Clancy adds. "If you are going to have a determined shi• in public policy, the way to do that is not creating an environment where the two sides are at war. A future government that believes there should be public ownership of key assets would do well to convene a conversation with the current owners of those assets about that transition." "To be done effectively it will require a measure of co- operation from companies." And while he acknowledges that executive pay is an issue, Clancy doesn't believe it should dominate the nar- rative about the privatised utilities. "Setting energy policy on the basis of rights and wrongs in the boardroom is unwise. We should be really focused on what we need to do to ensure the carbon future we want." But the industry shouldn't assume that the debate about its accountability to wider society isn't going to

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