A clearer admission that that DECC doesn't know its derriere from its demand side balancing reserve is hard to imagine. Junior minister Amber Rudd has ducked a simple request from Graham Stringer MP for the value of the cost of carbon emissions that it uses in formulating policy.
Graham Stringer: To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what the social cost per tonne of emitted carbon his Department uses to judge the cost benefit of energy policies.
Amber Rudd (The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State) The Department for Energy and Climate Change has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period. An answer is being prepared and will be provided as soon as it is available.
The cost of carbon emissions is supposed to be the figure by which everything that happens within DECC is judged. That they don't even know it shows clearly that the department is completely rudderless.
But we knew that.