Ed Miliband’s policies will leave the UK more dependent on electricity imports than ever before. But the interconnectors we rely upon are vulnerable to Russian and Chinese sabotage, as the destruction of Finnish cables on Christmas Day showed.
Electricity imports accounted for 16pc of our power in the first 9 months of 2024, and reached 19pc in June. Labour’s plan to decarbonise the Grid by 2030, and reluctance to develop new domestic nuclear capacity or exploit our gas reserves, means we we’ll depend more on imports.
Britain is already a net importer from all interconnected countries apart from Ireland, and government plans mean import capacity will double by 2035. The Government says “interconnectors will play an important role in the import and export of electricity to help us manage the peaks and troughs in our renewable energy generation.”
On Christmas Day an interconnector between Estonia and Finland was destroyed, apparently by Russia. Repairs will take months, endangering Finland’s power supply this winter. Several data and energy connections have been severed in the last year with China and Russia suspected.
In early January, Nick Timothy MP wrote to the National Security Adviser asking questions about what the Government is doing, given its policies, to protect British interconnectors from attack. Miliband’s net zero zealotry means he is forcing policy to move faster than technology allows. He claims his policies improve energy security when the opposite is true – just as he says prices will fall when thanks to him they will rise.
You can read Nick’s letter to the National Security Adviser below:
