Beyond Brexit, Covid-19 and the climate emergency, there is an important issue seemingly buried under a pile of ministerial paper, and it’s a fairly fundamental one. How, exactly, do we keep the lights on?
 
Until recently, nuclear power was positioned as the most carbon-efficient way of meeting the UK’s ‘baseload’ (always-on) electricity generation needs. With this in mind, Hitachi’s reversal of its plans to build a new nuclear power plant on Anglesey did not perhaps attract the attention it deserved.
 
As our ageing nuclear power stations – which currently provide around one-fifth of the UK’s electricity – enter the creaking and crumbling twilight of their lives, the issue of what takes their place becomes more pressing each day. On the current trajectory, they will all be gone by 2030.
 
Building new nuclear reactors to replace them is both complex and expensive. Only one is currently under construction in the UK, at the delayed and over-budget Hinkley Point C in Somerset. The next plant on the to-do list, at Sizewell C in Suffolk, has a key planning milestone next week, but is nowhere near construction stage.
 
This challenge is compounded by the expertise required. A repeat of the deal that secured the Chinese investment and involvement required to make Hinkley Point C viable seems much less palatable to this government than to its predecessors.
 
And that is before you factor in the clean-up operations at those existing nuclear plants. Brexit means we will likely leave Euratom – a treaty governing the trade of nuclear materials – and then there’s the troublesome question of who exactly funds decommissioning if the UK breaks up.
 
So, if not nuclear, then what?
 
There is no doubt solar and wind energy have improved hugely in terms of efficiency and lower costs, but what happens when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow?
 
National Grid provides a colourful and mesmerising live breakdown of our energy consumption and production which shows we are still too reliant on fossil fuels to deliver that baseload of power. If we are to meet our climate change objectives, this has to change.
 
This is where we get into Dominic Cummings’ ‘moonshoot’ territory. You can go deep into tidal generation (Swansea Bay’s termination doesn’t bode well), ponder whether the obsession of nuclearising everything in the 1950s was actually onto something with small modular reactors or, instead, keep on burning and hope that carbon capture and storage will dig us out of this hole.
 
The ultimate answer is likely to involve contributions from all of the above, combined with more efficient usage to reduce demand. On this front, there is some room for positivity. In 2017, UK energy consumption was down by 19% on the levels used in 2000, with consumer efficiency improving by 25%despite a growing population.
 
We may well be past peak demand, but the looming electricity crunch is still a fundamental and pressing issue, and one that appears to be lying relatively low down an already turbulent political agenda.