Concerned: UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne
Huhne warns of UK energy crisis
The UK is "very likely" to face an energy crisis within the next decade, Energy Minister Chris Huhne was quoted as saying on today, leaving the economy open to "very severe blows".
Reuters quoted Huhne as telling the Financial TImes that the UK faced a danger of becoming as vulnerable to oil price hikes as before the big North Sea oilfields were discovered in the 1970s.
"The world we're going into isn't going to be a world where the oil price will be $80 a barrel flat forever, or $150 a barrel flat forever," he said.
"It will be a world where we will have very substantial oil price spikes, which have an enormous capacity to provide shocks to the domestic economy and to the world economy, exactly as they did in the 1970s and 1980s."
Investing heavily in energy efficiency and renewable sources of power is the only way to avoid such shocks, the paper cited Huhne as saying.
"What worries me...is that we're moving from a world where the UK is dependent on imported energy for only 27% of our needs, to a world where it's going to be anything from 46% to 58% within 10 years," he said.
