Common Wealth, a campaigning group, has called for Britain’s gas power plants to be nationalised.

Seeing gas as needed for occasional use during demand peaks or renewable shortfalls the group expects gas to remain an energy source until the 2030s, but despite its declining influence, wants gas plants to be taken into public ownership, in the form of a state-owned “strategic reserve”. This, it claims, would enable capacity to be maintained but operated only as needed. This would reduce bills by stopping rent-seeking during imbalances on the grid, reducing reliance on Capacity Market payments to maintain security of supply, and eliminating profits in gas generation by operating the system at cost.

Common Wealth proposes placing gas plants under the direct dispatch control of the National Electricity System Operator (NESO) based on system-level needs, eliminating the price-setting role of gas plants.

Although there is some praise for Labour’s focus on expanding home-grown renewable electricity, it calls this “important and necessary, but not sufficient”, blaming high energy costs in the UK on structural economic factors, including the concentrated market power of privately-owned fossil gas plants.

Given the issues around steel production and the fraught birth of GB Energy, it is, however, highly debatable that the current Government would have the appetite or indeed the funding to seriously consider such action.

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