This year’s (2011) series of Beesley lectures was opened by Dieter Helm’s wide ranging examination of the UK government’s Electricity Market Reform (EMR) proposals and closed by Paul Dawson’s focused dissection of the carbon price support policy that has been developed alongside the EMR programme.
The opening lecture and the discussion that followed it illustrated the rather unusual state of affairs that exists in energy policymaking at the moment: there appears to be a consensus among leading economists familiar with the energy sector that the EMR proposals are badly flawed, and that they can be expected to fail.