Straight to the point

In the realm of science, few politicians are more powerful than Baroness Brown. As the chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, her remit is to consider the boundaries of Britain’s future: from AI to medicine, from biotechnology to climate change.

Of all these subjects, it is the latter that appears to interest Brown most. Indeed, not only does her work concern crafting Britain’s new energy strategy — she also stands to benefit from it.

There is no suggestion that Brown, a cross-bench peer known as Julia King before she was ennobled in 2015, has done anything unlawful, and in an email to UnHerd she stressed that her “integrity is critical”. Nevertheless, some of the entities now paying her may well come to benefit from the policies she has championed — including a decision by the new Labour government to invest at least £500 million in an unproven technology designed to store electricity.

In the middle of March, Brown’s committee published a report on “long-duration energy storage”. It took as read what some energy experts consider to be a controversial claim: that power generated by renewables such as wind farms and solar panels is cheaper than that from natural gas. The report’s main focus, however, was a large, unavoidable problem: what happens when there’s high demand for electricity, but the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

The solution it offered was certainly a novel one: a process known as “green hydrogen”. This would use electricity to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which would then be stored underground in salt caverns or disused natural gas reservoirs; when demand increased, it could then be burnt in adapted power plants to generate more electricity.

Such a proposal may sound like futuristic genius, but it wasn’t without its critics. In his evidence to the committee, Michael Liebreich, one of Britain’s foremost experts on green energy finance and technology, pointed out that green hydrogen is much more expensive to handle than that made by other means, such as “blue hydrogen”, which uses natural gas. In fact, turning “overhyped” green hydrogen into electricity effectively triples the original energy’s cost, because the process of doing so needs so much power. Undaunted, the committee said the government must “engage and communicate” with the public to cure “misperceptions”, in order to “ensure support for vital hydrogen and electricity infrastructure”.

In any event, days after the general election, the Department of Net Zero and Energy Security, led by Ed Miliband, announced it was honouring a Labour pledge to commit £500 million to green hydrogen, as Brown’s committee had recommended. Generous as this was, it seems inconceivable that it could lead to the creation of the gigantic power storage reservoir Britain would need by 2030 — the date by which the government has pledged to turn the country into a “clean energy superpower” with a net-zero electricity system.

On the first day that Brown’s committee met to hear evidence in September 2023, Brown declared two interests. One was a non-executive directorship at Ørsted, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of offshore wind, which pays her £40,000 a year. She also declared her non-executive directorship of a company called Ceres Power Holdings, at which her salary, according to the firm’s latest accounts, is £74,000. According to Ceres’s website, it intends to become the world’s biggest source of green hydrogen. “Future demand for electrolysis for green hydrogen production far exceeds supply,” wrote the Ceres CEO Phil Caldwell in the company’s 2023 annual report.

Unlike MPs, peers do not have to declare how much money they earn from their paid, outside interests. As well as her income from Ceres and Ørsted, Brown’s only other interest where her income is known is the £27,000 she receives from chairing a subcommittee of the Climate Change Committee, the powerful body that Ed Miliband created last time he was energy secretary in 2008, which has statutory powers to determine Britain’s energy mix and sets its “carbon budget”. This takes Brown’s disclosed outside earnings to £141,000 a year.

However, she also receives undisclosed sums as a paid adviser to the nuclear industry company Holtec; as the chair of Frontier IP, a tech investment firm whose portfolio includes solar panel makers; and as the chair of the advisory board of BGF, another venture-capital outfit that invests in both wind and solar power. She has also declared she owns shares in Rolls Royce, which intends to build small nuclear reactors.

When I reached Brown by telephone and asked her to reveal the scale of these further payments, she abruptly ended the call. In an email, she clarified that her “integrity is critical” and her “interests are set out in full in the Register of Interests”.

However, in terms of enhancing her influence, yet another of her paid jobs may be the most important of all — her chairing of the Carbon Trust. An international consultancy founded by Tony Blair’s government in 2001, this advises businesses and public sector institutions across the globe on how to cut emissions. (She also refused to divulge how much she is paid for this, but it is evident that the Trust is well-endowed, with offices in London, Beijing, Singapore, Johannesburg and Mexico City, among others.)

Crucially, her work with the Carbon Trust appears to overlap with her role in the House of Lords. On 11 January, Brown announced she had appointed a new Carbon Trust chief executive, Chris Stark. She knew Stark well, having served on the Climate Change Committee during the six years when he was the committee’s chief executive. Her current Lords register entry even lists him as a member of her staff.

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But Stark did not last long at the Trust, for on 9 July, five days after the election, Miliband revealed that Stark was to lead the government’s “Mission Control for Clean Power 2030”. He would, Miliband said, “have a laser-like focus” on delivering the government’s net-zero target and would be working with “key energy companies and organisations” to make this happen.

Brown is not the first public official to have become richer through her involvement with green energy. Andrew Montford, the director of campaign group Net Zero Watch, suggests the sector is especially prone to remunerating people with political influence: “The renewables industry is wholly dependent on politicians for its viability, and inevitably there are relationships that become much too close.”

The former Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer, now Lord Deben, is another of Brown’s associates, having chaired the Climate Change Committee 2012 – 23. Throughout this period, he was also chairman of Sancroft International, an environmental consultancy firm staffed by members of his family. In February 2019, I revealed that Sancroft had been paid more than £600,000 by firms that stood to benefit from the committee’s decisions, including Johnson Matthey, which was then in the electric vehicle battery business, and Drax, which has received billions of pounds in subsidies for burning wood pellets at its power plant in north Yorkshire.

Other examples include the former Liberal Democrat energy secretary Chris Huhne, who became a director of a wood pellet firm after his release from prison in 2013, and Chris Skidmore, the former Tory MP and energy minister, who also wrote a major report for the last government on how to achieve net zero. In January 2023, a year before he stepped down from Parliament, he started being paid an annual salary of £80,000 by the Emissions Capture Company, for what he described in the interests register as “providing advice on the global energy transition and decarbonisation”. For this, his entry said, he expected to work for between 160 and 192 hours a year.

As for Brown, she said in her email: “My role as chair of the cross-party Science and Technology Committee draws on the knowledge and expertise gained from my non-parliamentary work, and rather than being a conflict, this background strengthens the work I carry out in Parliament. On the Government’s recent decision to invest in hydrogen storage, I welcome this commitment and look forward to debating the committee’s report and its recommendations in the House in due course.”

In other words, we should be thankful that so many businesses in the energy sector want to reward her for her knowledge and skills. If only the rest of us could be so virtuous — and so prosperous.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/