Pensions

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a drinks party for a Climate Campaign organized by the Conservative Energy & Climate Change team. The crowd was amiable enough - mostly pin-striped types with a leavening of tweedy country squires and the odd celeb, as one might expect. But the level of bullshit was off the scale. And I'm not principally talking about the politicians, though there wasn't much substance to their words. I am talking about the guests - the people the Tories are talking to and apparently listening to on energy and climate policy.

One squire told me about the Energy-from-Waste (EfW) project that was planned for his neighbourhood, in which he was involved. This was not any old EfW project. It was a full-blown, cloud-cuckoo, mad-hatter's EfW project. Though located in the sticks, it was going to take twice as much material as the giant EfW plant that has just been built near Heathrow. It wasn't going to use conventional technology (like the Heathrow project), but gasification - a technology that people have been trying and failing for decades to implement commercially to run on waste. And this was not "vanilla" gasification (which is unproven enough for waste), but a particularly high-temperature version known as plasma technology. It wasn't just going to take municipal solid waste (MSW - the stuff in our bins), but waste straw and other agricultural residues and energy crops (which was where the squire came in), despite the fact that this plant would be located around 30 miles from one of the biggest existing straw-burners in the country, which had so distorted the market for waste straw when it was commissioned that it had pulled in material from a 150-mile radius. By some magical means, it would produce absolutely no waste by-products at all - not a tonne of char, tar or contaminated recyclate would need to go to landfill. And this, I have since discovered, was the scaled down version - it was originally intended to be twice as big, using technology from a different supplier (who had never built one before to demonstrate the commercial and technical feasibility of the concept). But most worryingly, though this fantasy project using unproven technology was expected to cost £200 million (according to the squire; £250 million, according to my subsequent research), they already had three-quarters of the funding in place, and had funders falling over themselves to provide the final 25%. Or so he said. I don't know if he had been fooled, or if he was trying to fool me, but someone somewhere was being kidded in a big way.

But perhaps he was just a lone fantasist. Or so I hoped until I spoke to a pin-striped type who ran a green-energy investment fund. I suggested to him that his difficulty would be finding enough projects that were solid enough and offered a good enough return to satisfy his investors, and that as a result he might have to be settling for less than ideal average returns. Not so, apparently. It seems that the world is awash with attractive, solid, green-energy projects, to the extent that he was confident of averaging 24% returns. That is some performance, when one considers that none of the renewable-energy companies that I am aware of is delivering figures like that, nor indeed many companies of any description. "Carbon prices" are low, support for mature technologies is being reduced, and estimated costs of immature technologies are being repeatedly increased. T. Boone Pickens has just knocked his plans for the biggest wind farm in the world on the head because he couldn't make it stack up, despite levels of support that have been making America the favourite country for new wind developments. Nothing in the world of green energy or the wider economy gives grounds for optimism, and yet this fund-manager was confident of returns to make a speculator blush.

But what was really concerning was the type of fund he ran. He claimed his fund acted as a middle-man to bridge the gap between pension funds and green-energy developers. If he was telling the truth (a big "if"), the money that he was taking to invest in these mystery projects, was money that ought to be invested in the safest, dullest investments available. But instead it was going into high-risk (whatever he claimed, you don't get 24% returns with low risks) green-energy projects promising returns that no experienced developer in the sector would believe remotely feasible.

Perhaps the room was just awash with fantasists, and the finance was not in reality so easily available for their fantasies as they claimed. In that case, we need "only" worry about the sort of advice that our probable future government is being given. This tone that there is easy money to be made in energy and climate change, and that the City can deliver masses of investment, profit and jobs in the sector if suitably encouraged certainly chimes with the Tories' policy pronouncements in this sector so far.

But just possibly, people in the City really believe this (as well as the Tories). The room was certainly throbbing with optimism. And there were a lot of pin-stripes there. And you can certainly find reports prepared by consultants that could justify this sort of delusion, if you were ignorant enough of the practicalities that you believed the consultants' bullshit. Could these people be representative of a City view that genuinely believes, despite never having built anything real in their lives, that longstanding technical obstacles, energy-price volatility, and sovereign risk from inadequate, badly-designed, micro-managed, government interventions, are details that can easily be overcome through a combination of their cash and their genius?

Tory MP Philip Hammond, shadow work and pension’s secretary, hit out yesterday at the Government's failure to help people who lost their life savings when company schemes went bust. Mr Hammond said the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) set up by the Government 18 months ago has made partial payments to only 871 people out of 125,000 whose company pensions collapsed.

Since when was it the Government’s job to bail out people who have invested in to private pension funds? If I invest in a private company and it goes bust I don’t expect the government to hand back my cash and say better luck next time. So, why should individuals be guaranteed their money back when the company scheme they chose to invest in goes bust?