Sustainable Bristol

Minister tours Bristol’s Green Businesses

Posted on 12 March 2011

Chris Huhne MP (left), Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is welcomed to Bristol by Peter Madden, CEO of Forum for the Future.

At the end of February, Chris Huhne, the Government Minister in charge of energy and climate change came down to Bristol to see what the city is up to.

He visited the wind turbines at Avonmouth. He drove Wessex Water’s ‘Bio-Bug’ (otherwise known as the ‘poo-powered car’). And he joined a meeting  hosted by Forum for the Future’s CEO, Peter Madden, to hear from the companies and organisations at the forefront of building the low-carbon economy in Bristol.

The Minister was visibly impressed by the enthusiasm and activity here. He heard from some of Bristol’s most successful green businesses: Garrad Hassan, the world’s biggest renewables consultancy; Marine Current Turbines, the global number one in marine and tidal energy; and Triodos Bank, who lend tens of millions for sustainable projects.

There were some strong messages to the Minister. Pretty much everyone in the meeting said he should set some clear, ambitious, policy goals and stick to them, rather than chopping and changing. Business needs certainty to invest, they said, so don’t suddenly shift the ground-rules – as his department has recently done on support for large-scale solar energy projects.

Mr Huhne was reminded that David Cameron had promised, in his first major speech as Prime Minister, to make Bristol a “centre for marine energy”. This is certainly an area where we could really be a global leader. Round here, we not only have some of the world’s top companies, two great universities, and lots of people skilled in advanced engineering, but off our shores we have some of the best tidal and wave energy to found anywhere. (For example, the River Severn has the second highest tidal range in the world, of up to 50ft, and this creates a great mass of moving water which is ideal for generating power).

We also talked about how to grow and expand our green businesses more quickly. In the UK, we tend to be excellent at the research and development and coming up with the ideas. But we are much less good at commercialising these ideas. Too often it seems to be the Germans or Chinese who end up with the manufacturing jobs that stem from our innovations. We seem to lack the investment to take the kind of small entrepreneurial companies, that Bristol has so many of, to scale.

Chris Huhne promised to work with Bristol-based companies and organisations on how we can grow our environmental businesses. We’re obviously incredibly well-positioned to be at the forefront of these industries of the future and to benefit from the thousands of skilled jobs that would bring. Now we need to get stuck in and grab the opportunities before somebody else does.