Utility Week

UTILITY Week 7th November 2014

Utility Week - authoritative, impartial and essential reading for senior people within utilities, regulators and government

Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/410309

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 8 of 31

UtILItY WeeK | 7th - 13th November 2014 | 9 Interview J onathan Brearley is enjoying the view. As the UK's electricity market goes through its biggest overhaul since privatisation, the man who designed the programme is watching from the outside. And delayed timelines notwithstanding, he likes what he sees. Twelve months aer his shock departure from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), the architect of EMR is ready to talk. In his first and only interview since, he tells Utility Week how and why EMR was envisaged, whether the department is getting it right, and where the energy industry is going wrong on self-representation. "I picked up the capacity market rules the other day… I remember when it was a concept on a PowerPoint slide," he says over coffee on a Fitzrovia terrace. Over the course of the next hour, Brearley, charming and unas- suming, fields Utility Week's questions with the ease of a man who is no stranger to scrutiny. Brearley, a civil servant for over a decade, designed the UK's electricity market reform in 2009 before leav- ing the department as the legislation began its journey through Parliament in mid-2013. This raises the question: why leave the helm of EMR before the ship comes in? At the time, his exit was reported as a devastating blow to the fledgling legislation, which was designed to cement the EMR framework, and a symptom of a depart- ment torn apart by tensions in the coalition government and undermined by the Treasury. "I stayed until I was confident that EMR would be delivered, but I felt it was time for a change for me," Brearley replies with barely a pause. There is no doubt he's had practice answering this question. In 2009, he explains, he imagined his tenure as a top civil servant at Decc would last only another couple of years. But a new course for Brearley – and the UK energy industry as a whole – was set with a pre-summer holi- day meeting request from the head of Decc. The schedule referred to the meeting as a 'catch up', Brearley recalls. "Now there's only two reasons you get that: you're either going to be fired or you're going to get a really hard job. It was the latter," he says with a smile. The hard job was a total redesign of the policy frame- work underpinning the energy market to address the triple challenge of securing supply, while decarbonising the power sector and keeping consumer bills affordable. But at this stage no-one at Decc had any idea of the scale of the reform that would be needed. Political pressure to keep a lid on rising bills is per- ennial, Brearley explains, and the Climate Change Act of 2008 had already put decarbonisation firmly on the agenda. But the scale of the UK's impending supply shortfall was not fully appreciated until early 2010. "When I started I had a fairly sanguine view of secu- rity of supply," Brearley says, with a wry nod to this sum- mer's unprecedented string of unplanned outages and the risk looming for the coming winter. "Very quickly, within the first two to three months, it became clear from conversations I had with industry, and from the new analysis that we started to run, that we had a more serious problem than we thought. "But even then we thought the emerging problem would be hitting a bit later than it's started to hit." The capacity crunch point had been anticipated towards the end of the decade, but as early as 2017/18, as

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Utility Week - UTILITY Week 7th November 2014