Energy powers the economy, and one of the Government's key responsibilities is to ensure the UK continues to enjoy secure, competitively priced energy. We are importing more of our energy, and competition for energy resources can make prices volatile, as the spike in oil prices in the summer of 2008 demonstrated.
At the same time, to tackle climate change and meet our own emissions targets, we need to accelerate the move to a low-carbon energy supply.
The Energy white paper 2007: ‘Meeting the energy challenge’ set out our strategy for addressing these challenges.
It is clear that to achieve secure, affordable and low-carbon energy in the years and decades ahead, we need an energy mix that is diverse, both in terms of technologies and geographical sources of imported fuels, within a market framework that offers us competitive prices.
In these pages, you can read about our solutions in more detail, including a massive expansion of renewables, new nuclear power stations and pioneering Carbon Capture and Storage technology to clean up the fossil fuels we use in the future.
You will see our solutions include innovative technologies such as fuel cells and wave energy, heat as well as electricity, and small solutions (photovoltaic cells on the roof of your house, for example) as well as large ones.