Energy concerns for UK plastics industry

London – The British Plastics Foundation has added it’s concerns to reports that UK gas supplies are nearing exhaustion and widespread blackouts might be imminent.

“We’re in a world governed by unexpected events”, stated public & industrial affairs director Philip Law.

“We expect our government to have plans in place. Just where are we going with energy in the UK? We may or may not be running out of gas in early April but this sorry saga pointedly reinforces the message we’ve been hacking away at government with for over two years”, added Law.

BPF president, Philip Watkins, and Peter Davis, its director-general raised the issue directly with George Osborne only a couple of weeks ago. They have called for a fast-track new replacement energy generation capacity and gas storage to ensure that supply equals demand and that energy costs do not escalate.

“We just can’t sail so close to the wind like this. Industry needs the confidence that it will be able to fulfil it’s contracts,” said Law. “We can’t divert resources to sorting out emergency power supplies and radically rescheduling production schedules. The government must realise that without energy there is no industrial economy and it’s got to fix this.”

“Reliance on renewable energy just won’t wash,” he added. “It nowhere near fulfils the volume requirements and all its introduction appears to be doing at the moment is ramping up electricity bills through the Feed in Tariff charges designed to incentivise its greater deployment. One leading energy supplier has recently notified an increase of the Feed in Tariff charge rate it is applying from £1.88 per MWh to £2.42 per MWh,” Law concluded.

A key member of the BPF with 11 manufacturing sites up and down the UK, has reported to us that this, together with the lack of UK gas storage facilities (reported at just 8% of capacity this morning), has pushed the company’s electricity bills 25% higher than in April 2012.