Boss of Miliband’s GB Energy Admits No One Knows What It Is
The £350,000-a-year boss of Ed Miliband’s GB Energy has admitted that hardly anyone knows what the quango is or why it exists. The Telegraph has the story.
Dan McGrail, GB Energy’s £350,000-a-year Chief Executive, told energy executives at a dinner: “The most popular question that I get asked is, ‘So what is GB Energy?’”
According to industry publication Energy Voice, he added: “That is both a challenge and my opportunity to create some shape for this.”
The admission will be an embarrassment for Mr Miliband, who promoted the body as Britain’s answer to European state-owned energy companies such as France’s EDF, Norway’s Equinor or Denmark’s Ørsted. Companies like these currently own nearly half the UK’s offshore wind farms.
GB Energy has been given a budget of £8.3 billion, but this is a tiny amount compared to the assets and investments of similar companies on the continent. Its main project to date has been a £200 million investment in rooftop solar for public sector buildings like schools and hospitals.
Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary, labelled the quango “a total farce”. She said: “Ed Miliband is spending an astonishing amount of taxpayers’ money on an energy company that won’t even produce any energy.”
Richard Tice, Reform’s Energy Spokesman, said: “It should be scrapped along with Net Zero. That’s the only way to bring bills down and lower the cost of living.” …
Setting up GB Energy was one of Mr Miliband’s key election pledges. He told voters the body would “bring cheap, clean and secure energy” to UK consumers and businesses.
“We have a simple proposition: if it is right for the Danes, the French, the Norwegians and the Swedes to own British energy assets, it is right for the British people to do so as well,” the Energy Secretary said last autumn.
However, the quango has attracted scrutiny over its delivery record to date. Jürgen Maier, GB Energy’s Chairman, admitted earlier this year that it could take two decades to deliver on Labour’s manifesto pledge to create 1,000 green energy jobs in Aberdeen.
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“That is both a challenge and my opportunity to create some shape for this.”
FFS! Billions of our money and he finds it hard to explain and it has no shape??? And HE is creating it? Didn’t the minister TELL him what the “shape” should be??
Nice work if you can get it.
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it riding the gravy train
Nope – because to them it doesn’t really matter – they’ve secured £8Bn and can now start to funnel it to the right ‘causes’…
…’causes’ being the euphemism for pockets.
Well it’s like almost everything politicians come up with – a bunch of fluff which captures a general public sentiment but is completely devoid of details and ends up being defined and “shaped” by unelected bureaucrats.
That is why our system is nothing like most people envisage it or describe it. We don’t have a democratic system where the public decides anything. We have a system of technocrats with politicians who sell the decisions and actions of the technocrats to the public.
Some of these decisions become a hard sell. Like housing immigrants in 4 star hotels.
I think democracy can work if people are vigilant and set limits on state power. Sadly people seem unwilling to do either of those thing, present company excepted.
He came from the pressure group Renewables UK who pushed for every uneconomic expensive source of generally unreliable energy – wind, solar, tidal, hydrogen – to be foisted on the country. Trying to be like EDF who are an established energy company or Equinor with oil and gas production requires more than a few £billion. Far more chance of being like Oersted as it tries to raise money to avoid going bankrupt.
I know what it’s for. Assuming Net Grifto were to continue, as more wind and solar litter the landscape exacerbating the intermittency problem and increasing reliance on gas spinning generation, investment to build new or replace old gas stations will not be there.
Subsidies will be required for new gas, guaranteed above market rates for output, wind and solar will need higher and higher strike prices, more frequent and higher constraint payments, and all this will end up on bills – politically poisonous.
Solution: nationalise the electricity industry. Step forward GB Energy to be the new British electricity provider. (Back to the good old days.)
This way the shortfall between revenue and costs will be covered by HM Treasury out of taxation which will be invisible to the Great Unwashed. Instead of the eye-watering costs appearing on bills, these will stabilise, maybe go down a little and instead consumers will pay via their taxes.
This is how it used to be for the various State-run entities, prior to Margaret Thatcher.
Once it’s state-owned and tax-payer funded, they’ll finally (as if by magic) be able to honour their commitment to reduce bills by £300. We won’t be any better off, of course, but they’ll find a way to massage the figures and tell us that we’re all better off, even though some of us may not feel it.
Ah fiddling the balance sheet you mean? So the bill goes down but tax payment goes up by more! One couldn’t make up such a ponzi scheme, but Millibrain did. Or perhaps RR or Stalin. Or perhaps they just think the Public won’t notice? Well I and you certainly did!
Perhaps we should legislate to transfer the British energy assets owned by foreign companies to GB Energy by making them an offer that can’t be refused.
How about swapping them for some of the National Debt? In other words you owe us money for having these assets in the UK? Say a rent of 100 times the subsidy payment? Sounds good to me! What a clever TAX.
Claire Coutinho is a total farce, Miliwatt is just continuing the poilicies she implemented. Tories think we are all thick and can’t remember what they did for 14 years. There are done as a party. Hardly any of them will find gainful employment outside of the HoP. They are all useless.
No worse than useless, just fools with our money!
Being working class myself (and proud of it)
Most people don’t know what a quango is! Let alone what it does.
The british working class still make up the majority of the UK, and are the ones who will lead this new ‘reset’ resistance, hopefully, while we are still the majority!
We need another Churchill 🇬🇧 🏴 !
(I once had a dream about trees and ropes, by Westminster palace, one by one, cheers of hurrah from the triumphant throng at each last drop!, just a dream? Traitors all? ..Or just..preminition!)
I hope the dream comes true Dinger.
From the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy: They were the first against the wall when the revolution came….
I have a nasty feeling it is very close now. Perhaps that is why we never see the PM in the Country any more, he is in hiding?
…if it is right for the British people to do so as well,”
Except British people do not own British energy assets. We are robbed by the government in order to fund them but we certainly do not own them and actually have never been asked if we want to own these fictional assets. Indisputably, if asked the answer would be a resounding no. More lies from Satan’s assistant.
Mad Milly could be in line to succeed Keith