Beyond this, there are the capacity auctions which the government has now decided are necessary in order to ensure that there is sufficient gas-fired generating capacity to back up intermittent wind. Companies like EDF, E.ON and Centrica will be paid to build new plants and to keep them in readiness. Because they will have to generate at short notice they will not be the highly efficient combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) which have provided nearly half of our electricity for the past 20 years, but wasteful open cycle turbines which will also produce more CO2.

Before the passage in 2008 of the Climate Change Act (Rt Hon E. Miliband, proprietor), energy company bosses assumed they would be vying with one another to build new CCGTs during the present decade. After all, why wouldn't they want to invest their companies' money in one of the largest and most lucrative energy markets in the world? Instead, deterred by the government's rush for renewables and growing appetite for intervention, they are waiting for the next subsidy.

There is more to come when the new energy bill — much delayed as the Tories belatedly began to understand the consequences — receives royal assent towards the end of the year. The bill, as one senior civil servant observed, essentially gives the secretary of state full powers to intervene at all points of the electricity supply industry. Of course, usually it won't be the secretary of state who intervenes, but an ever-growing band of civil servants in an extraordinary proliferation of agencies — an explosion of indoor relief for the middle classes.

The energy bill amounts to a massive toolkit for hyperactive dirigiste politicians and civil servants — a real throwback to the pre-Thatcher corporate state. The one and very critical area where the energy bill fails to intervene is in the failed wholesale market for electricity. This is odd, given the presence of Tories in the Coalition. 

The Conservatives should reflect on their past successes. Competitive gas trading was pioneered in Britain 20 years ago and successfully exported to the rest of the EU. The economic benefits were huge, though now unacknowledged. Gas came first, then electricity. Gas was the more successful, partly because from the very beginning there were a large number of competitors and a lack of vertical integration.