The Energy & Climate Change Secretary has called renewable energy critics ‘curmudgeons and faultfinders’ and says they are ‘selling Britain’s ingenuity short’.

Huhne was firing shots at the Chancellor George Osborne

Chris Huhne seems to never be out of the spotlight. A couple of weeks ago he was slamming those who doubt the cost-effectiveness of renewable energy sources, such as wind power, and last week he wrote a controversial article in the Telegraph in which he seemed to use a straw-man argument to dismiss the recent Shale gas discovery.

The Energy & Climate Change Secretary says that some people ‘argue that we should abandon everything else and devote ourselves wholly to shale’. He instead argues that a varied energy mix is the best way to energy security.

It would appear he was taking a swipe at the Chancellor George Osborne, who recently showed a more sensible approach to energy policy, saying that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”.

However, as James Forsyth notes in the spectator, shale gas advocates don’t want to ‘bet Britain’s future on shale gas’, they just want shale to be acknowledged as the significant discovery it is.

Huhhe is a massive advocate of wind farms, believing they are the solution to Britain’s dependency on fossil fuels. However, wind power only generates on average around a quarter of its actual capacity, and that is generated at times when demand is relatively low, meaning that gas or coal power stations are needed as backups for times when the wind is not blowing strongly enough.

Controversy

Huhne has been surrounded by controversy since the coalition government formed. His former wife recently told how he informed her he was having an affair at half time during a world cup match, made a twitter gaffe regarding Theresa May and quickly deleted it, and was accused of avoiding a driving ban by getting his then wife to take the points on her license to protect him.