IS it really fair to expect businesses to pay the price of Britain’s disjointed green energy policy and a chronic failure to invest in energy infrastructure?

Industry is facing a winter of power interruptions after a warning that the UK could face electricity shortages in the event of a big freeze.

The National Grid’s spare capacity is precipitously low – the worst for a decade - and heavy users, such as the steel and pharmaceuticals industries on Teesside, may be told to shut down for critical periods this winter.

Forcing big business to turn off the lights is a particularly heavy-handed way of preventing politically-damaging blackouts.

Concerns about climate change are very real, and we should take them seriously, but yesterday’s warning should be a wake-up call to the Government that Britain needs a more joined-up energy policy.

We are switching from an old way of generating our power to new, more energy-efficient, methods but the next few years will be needlessly difficult because old coal-fired power plants are being switched off before new ones come on stream.

The Government decided too late to throw its lot in with nuclear power stations and then found itself hostage to fortune when foreign companies decided the deal on the table to build them was not good enough.

We have subsidised ambitious wind farms but not the back-up capacity required when the wind does not blow (or blows too hard).

Our politicians have put their trust in the usual British way of just muddling through until the new generating capacity comes online.

In the past couple of years the country has dodged the bullet thanks to record-breaking mild winters but one of these years winter will return with a vengeance – and the lights could go out.

Security of power supply must always be at the forefront of policy-making. Going forward we need to be certain that the old power generating closure programme is more closely tied into the commissioning of new capacity.