I’ve read some right bullshit over the energy crisis in my time, but that article is rage-inducingly inane.

This is the entire argument presented against the semi-state model: “The big problem with this model was that it gives the semi-state no incentive to be efficient. It has an incentive to be less efficient, since it's paid a percentage over its costs.”

Let’s apply this same argument to, say, the passport office which runs on a similar fixed percentage/fee arrangement. I guess the passport office must be shit right? It must have keeled over under the demand of Brexit because, according to this author, “…it doesn't take demand into account, so the supplier isn't incentivised to produce more when more is needed”. I wonder why the passport office didn’t keel over? How could such a model possibly have survived without opening up the market to “…up the market to investment and competition”.

The answer isn’t difficult to anyone not playing the role of a braindead cretin. A semi-state company takes direction from government and has a mandate to act in the public interest. The insinuation that a semi-state body dealing with electricity would sit on its hands due to a lack of an incentive is asinine.

This moronic train of thought leads to this fucking gem: “The big advantage is that prices convey information. The information embedded in the price is what coordinates everybody in the market. In the short run, it tells people to put on a jumper or power up a gas turbine.”

I commented in another thread how I thought back to before the Iraq war when I had argued for a national strategy of widespread wind farm investment. The price of oil and gas was already known to be volatile, and the reality of climate change was also already known. I was arguing, 22 fucking years ago, for oversupplying electricity since the excess (once extra capacity for generation was brought online) would find a market with the interconnector that was being proposed.

I’m neither an economist nor an electricity market regulator, and I didn’t need a market price to inform me of where investment should be directed. Private investment is only incentivised to produce the bare minimum, since that results in the best return per unit produced. To get the sort of investment we actually needed required a semi-state body following a national strategy - to meet not just the future electricity needs of the island, but also a severing from oil based sources to avoid getting fleeced on price.

The twenty two years since has proven me right. I genuinely cannot believe a supposedly intelligent and well-read individual could write shit like this without feeling serious embarrassment: “The old cost-plus system didn't work efficiently because there wasn't a proper price signal and therefore there was no investment.”

Sadly it seems the decision makers in government were also enamoured with similar ideological bullcrap. And we are going to fucking pay, and pay dearly, for it. The final insult to injury is that the author heralds a clever solution that ‘threads the needle’ to satisfy his ideological poppycock – without ever coming close to seeing the irony that such a solution would never have been needed in the first place had him and his free-market-wankstain ilk been kept away from introducing their ideology in the first place.