This week saw Britain going a full week without burning any coal to generate its electricity.
This is remarkable and the first time that it has happened since the Industrial Revolution. The new record comes just two years after Britain marked its first full day without coal.
With more and more of our electricity coming from renewable energy like wind turbines and solar panels and from natural gas, these coal-free periods will become longer and more frequent. Ultimately the aim is for Britain to become the clean energy capital of Europe.
As we have seen from the recent climate change protests, the calls for the Government to do more and to go faster with these changes is getting louder.
The Government is already being urged to ban diesel and petrol vehicles by 2040 or sooner. Household coal fires, heating oil and log burners are also on the list of things that some groups want to see banned in the name of climate change. This list pretty much covers most households in Pembrokeshire.
This week I met with Calor Gas who provide gas for many households in our County who are not on the mains gas system. 56% of homes in Pembrokeshire are not on the gas mains and rely on deliveries of heating oil or LPG gas which are increasingly seen as bad for climate change.
For civil servants or national environmental campaign groups based in London, they look at the future and see a simple set of stepping stones to becoming a zero carbon society. Electric cars will replace traditional engines and hydrogen will eventually replace mains gas and so on.
However, as with superfast broadband and hospitals, what works for cities and large towns may not work for rural communities.
Homes that currently use heating oil and LPG gas need a secure, reliable and affordable alternative. Some of the solutions that the environmental groups are telling Government to support, like ground source heat pumps, are very expensive.
So my message to Ministers is to tread with care and give people and businesses as much time as possible to prepare. What seems like a gradual change far off in the future can come around very quickly.
At the end of this week I will be visiting Hinckley Point to see how Britain’s latest nuclear power station is being built. Nuclear has been an important source of low carbon energy for the UK but it comes with other challenges.
The Hinkley Point development is one of the largest construction sites in Europe right now with many Welsh people working there. Last week I met with one Milford Haven engineering firm who have around thirty men on site at Hinckley.
As the history of the Haven waterway demonstrates, big energy projects can provide both short-term and long-term jobs that benefit a community. However, as global and national energy markets change, so do the risks to these jobs. And if our energy system is to change in the way that many of the campaigners want then we will see big changes to industry in this country.
So I will continue to strike a cautionary note. Yes, I am in favour of new low carbon energy sources. However, I also want Government, at all levels, to be thinking ahead and planning for change so as to avoid inflicting huge extra costs on households or creating large scale job losses.