THE return of King Coal, a kickstart for the stalled wind revolution, the bridging of the UK energy gap. That is three ways of looking at a Budget which some in the Department of Energy and Climate Change will see as a bit of Treasury grandstanding on their patch.

In easier financial times – without the need to tax high earners and borrow the country out of recession – the Chancellor may have been tempted to have called this a Budget for the Green Revolution so sweeping were his plans to inject money or introduce tax reliefs to spark investment in renewable energy technologies.

Paul Golby, the boss of E.On, is one who believes Darling was in any case in the last chance saloon to save the coal-fired electricity generating industry and give birth to a fully commercial wind energy business. “The Government has clearly realised we're at a tipping point with energy policy — if the energy industry and the Government get it wrong we face power cuts and irreversible climate change,” he said.

“If we get it right then we can look forward to a secure, low carbon energy future for the UK. We believe the Government is right to increase support for cleaner coal through carbon capture and storage and offshore wind. The Government must now urgently set out the roadmap that draws all this together.”

Fiscally, for wind, in addition to a showboating announcement that the European Investment Bank is prepared to put up £4 billion of project finance, Darling is handing out another £525 million of taxpayer subsidies to operators so long as they start building the wind farms they have licences for by 2011.

For coal, it is £90 million of research and development grants and a further “funding mechanism” to produce up to four projects demonstrating how to capture and then store carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels — a technology which would environmentally allow the UK to start widescale burning of our coal reserves once more.

Derrick Parkes, energy tax partner at the accountant KPMG, was one expert prepared to claim Darling is closing the UK's energy gap — that we will now have enough generating capacity in the next decade when so many fear that demand will outstrip supply.

Those who fear the energy gap will still fear the worst.

Governments may want wind farms built but if the components are too expensive or too scarce and the cost of linking them to the National Grid is too onerous then they simply will not get built.
As for carbon capture and storage, the technology on a widescale commercial level is not proven.

Experts like Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw say the technology will not be viable until at least 2020 – and he's regarded by the rest of the industry as optimistic.

Darling did call his Budget one for “the growth of the green industries of the future.” He has left his successors much to do.