Herald Scotland: Shale gas is the answer to our ever-growing energy demands

We take it for granted that politicians are interested in power.

Not merely interested, in many cases, but obsessed. Gordon Brown, for example, became so crazed by power that he could have been mistaken for a member of the German hip-hop combo Snap!, advising us to "stay off my back, or I will attack, and you don't want that".

So it comes as a surprise to discover that the current batch of egomaniacs haven't, it turns out, been nearly interested enough in power. The energy regulator Ofgem has announced that the UK's reserve margin, currently 14 %, will fall to around 2% by 2015. What's more, within the next 10 years Britain will need to replace more than 20% of its generating capacity.

This presents the prospect of a return to the 1970s, a decade which those of us old enough to remember think of as suffused with the glow of candlelight – chiefly because there seemed to be power cuts every other day. According to Ofgem the risk of blackouts has doubled in less than a year, because of the Government's failure to replace coal and gas plants with new power stations.  MORE