Brexit Impact on UK Energy 'Unknowable' Now: Minister

UK energy minister Richard Harrington told the House of Lords subcommittee on energy October 25 that it was too early to say what would be the nature of the country's future energy relationship with the European Union, once it was outside it.

However, he said that economic self-interest could remove any problems as it was in the interests of both sides for bilateral trade to continue, and his hope was that would indeed be the case, with as little change as possible to today's arrangements.

As the committee concluded its evidence gathering for its report on Brexit and energy security, the chairman Robin Teverson (Liberal Democrat) got nowhere with questions about whether the UK would be part of the internal energy market and institutions such as the Agency for the Co-operation of Energy Regulators and the European gas and power transmission system operators (Entso-e and Entso-g respectively), or merely have observer status, such as Norway does at Entsoe.

Teverson conceded that answers to these questions would only become clearer once the UK-EU Brexit negotiations moved on to the second stage. At the current rate of progress this will be unlikely to conclude before the committee's report is due to be debated in parliament. Its publication is expected some time in December.

Harrington did argue that mutual economic self-interest combined with UK leadership on many areas of liberalisation – "We did write the rule book," he said – would ensure that gas and power would continue to flow between the EU and the UK after Brexit, just as they had in the past.

And he did point out that market solutions would be found before it was necessary to test whether the UK was in or out of the security of gas supply agreement that binds the other EU states. which he described as an extreme circumstance. The UK has some gas of its own, as well as being connected to Norway by pipelines and to the rest of the world through an LNG market. And the UK had functioned before the the internal energy market was set up, he said.

But the two seemed to agree that economic arguments do not always win the day and that political relations between the EU and the UK will be key to what sort of an energy future awaits them both.

William Powell