the-energy-transition
Satire. This post is fiction. The people, offices, quotations and legislation in it are invented, and nothing in it is a factual claim about any real person or body. Build UK's sourced material is in the Watchdog and the policy library.
Your grid-independent biscuit, sir. Baked using conventional, non-intermittent fossil energy in 2024, stored at room temperature, and completely unaffected by localized cloud…
HARROW:
Your grid-independent biscuit, sir. Baked using conventional, non-intermittent fossil energy in 2024, stored at room temperature, and completely unaffected by localized cloud cover.
CLUTTERWORTH:
(Taking the biscuit and staring gloomily out the window at the glossy black rectangle propped awkwardly against the birdbath)
Look at it, Harrow. Seven hundred pounds of Chinese silicon lying in the buttercups, tethered to our domestic infrastructure by a lead that passes through the scullery window, over the coat rack, and into the dark, greasy abyss behind a 1990s Zanussi refrigerator!
If Isambard Kingdom Brunel were alive today, he would not be building the Great Western Railway or spanning the Avon Gorge. He would be sitting on a lawn chair in Hampshire, staring at an extension lead, trying to work out why his £700 solar panel can’t generate enough juice to power a single-slice toaster without blowing the fuse in the scullery!
HARROW:
If I may, sir, the manufacturer’s booklet notes that you are “reducing your carbon footprint by up to 180 kilograms annually.”
CLUTTERWORTH:
180 kilograms! Harrow, the Brigadier produces 180 kilograms of methane every fortnight! We have an agricultural power station roaming the rhododendrons, and the Department for Energy Security expects me to save the planet by trickling eight hundred watts into the back of a freezer!
And the battery situation! That is the true stroke of Whitehall genius! In Germany, a schoolboy can wire a lithium-phosphate cell to his balcony panel, store the midday sun, and boil his kettle at six o’clock while watching the news.
In this country, if you generate a surplus watt at one o’clock, it flows straight out into the national grid for free—where the energy company collects it, wraps it in a bureaucratic bow, and sells it back to Mrs Henderson in Whitfield for thirty-four pence a kilowatt-hour! It isn’t a transition, Harrow! It’s a protection racket with a green sticker on it!
(Outside, the Brigadier wanders over to the solar panel, sniffs the tempered glass with deep suspicion, and lets out a long, thunderous snort that fogs up the entire lower panel.)
CLUTTERWORTH:
There. You see? The panel is now obscured by equine condensation. Our peak output has just dropped from eight hundred watts to three. We are currently generating enough power to illuminate the digital clock on a microwave from 1988.
HARROW:
Shall I pack it back into the box, sir?
CLUTTERWORTH:
No, Harrow. Leave it there. It shall stand as a monument to modern British energy policy: highly expensive, completely unintegrated, blocked by a Grade II listed oak, and covered in horse breath.
Now, go and check on the fridge. If the compressor catches fire, do not call the fire brigade. Call the Secretary of State for Energy. Tell her our personal energy transition has commenced, and ask if she’d like to answer a question about it on Reddit.
And Harrow?
HARROW:
Sir?
CLUTTERWORTH:
Bring the Brigadier inside. If he eats the oak tree, at least we’ll get some sun on the lawn.
Signed,
Sir Randybottom Clutterworth KC
This post was written using AI as a disclosed accessibility tool by a dyslexic author. The ideas, experience, and policy positions are entirely human.