Energy crisis to hit Britain in 10 years, Chris Huhne warns

Britain is likely to face an energy crisis within the next decade, Energy Minister Chris Huhne warned today, leaving the economy open to "very severe blows".

Huhne said Britain faced a danger of becoming as vulnerable to oil prices as it was in the days before the North Sea oil was discovered in the Seventies.

"The world we're going into isn't going to be a world where the oil price will be $80 a barrel flat forever, or $150 a barrel flat forever," he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

"It will be a world where we will have very substantial oil price spikes, which have an enormous capacity to provide shocks to the domestic economy and to the world economy, exactly as they did in the Seventies and Eighties."

He said investing heavily in energy efficiency and renewable sources of power was the only way to avoid such shocks.

"What worries me... is that we're moving from a world where the UK is dependent on imported energy for only 27% of our needs, to a world where it's going to be anything from 46% to 58% within 10 years."