About the Energy Group
The Department of Trade and Industry's Energy Group deals with a wide range of energy related matters, from its production or generation to its eventual supply to the customer. The Group is headed by Director General Joan MacNaughton.
The Group is committed to working with others to ensure competitive energy markets while achieving safe, secure and sustainable energy supplies. Its role is to set out a fair and effective framework in which competition can flourish for the benefit of customers, the industry and suppliers, and which will contribute to the achievement of the UK's environmental and social objectives. These include the alleviation of fuel poverty, and maintaining the security and diversity of the UK energy sources.
On 24 February the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry published the Government’s Energy White Paper “Our energy future - creating a low carbon
economy”. It defines a long-term strategic vision for energy policy combining our environmental, security of supply, competitiveness and social goals. It sets out the challenges we face on the environment, the decline of our indigenous energy supplies and the need to update our energy infrastructure and the policies we need to pursue over the next twenty years and beyond to meet these challenges. Central to these policies are the four goals for our energy policy:
- to put ourselves on a path to cut the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions - the main contributor to global warming - by some 60% by about 2050 with real progress by 2020;
- to maintain the reliability of energy supplies;
- to promote competitive markets in the UK and beyond, helping to raise the rate of sustainable economic growth and to improve our productivity; and
- to ensure that every home is adequately and affordably heated.
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