UK faces stark choices with energy bill If you are looking for evidence that Britain is on the brink of an energy revolution, look across the North Sea to Denmark. Here, at facilities owned by Germany's Siemens, engineers are field testing rotors for powerful new wind turbines that will turn above British waters. Or look across the Channel and you will find a factory in Burgundy working on steam generators that will help power Britain's first new nuclear reactor for more than two decades. Areva, the French company whose EPR reactor will be the heart of the first plant, is one of the main partners of EDF Energy, the UK subsidiary of France's EDF, which is leading Britain's nuclear transformation. The world's energy companies have had a stake in the UK's liberalised electricity market for many years. Today, however, the stakes are high. Britain is in the middle of a wholesale transformation of its electricity market that will require billions of pounds of investment and generate thousands of jobs. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the UK government to set an active industrial policy, one that will underpin the desired shift in power generation and leave a lasting economic legacy. Later this week, it will attempt to do so in the UK energy bill. But the results of policy to date are mixed. The companies at the forefront of Britain's offshore wind power developments are not British but, among others, German and Danish (Vestas). Nationality of developers or manufacturers should not matter. What should be a concern, though, is if much of the necessary equipment ends up being built abroad. And as my colleague, Pilita Clark, reported in October, many of the turbines in UK waters were made abroad. To be fair, many turbine manufacturers have announced plans to build factories in the UK. However, none of this has so far become reality as companies held off final investment decisions amid uncertainty over the government's policy on renewable energy subsidies. Yet creating a sustainable indigenous industry is not that easy in a competitive global marketplace. Germany's government spent billions of euros supporting a domestic solar industry, only to see it fall victim to cut-price competition from China. This, coupled with changes to the subsidies system from April this year, has seen some of the biggest industry names collapse; Q-Cells, once the world's largest solar-cell maker, is being bought by Hanwha Group of South Korea after soaring debt brought it to the brink of bankruptcy, while Robert Bosch, the car parts manufacturer, has said it will close a solar plant in Thuringia. In the US, the domestic solar industry has experienced a similar shake-out, in part prompted by fierce Chinese competition. The companies leading the new UK nuclear programme are French and Japanese. Areva and Hitachi will be using their reactor designs for the new plants. There could have been a domestic champion had Gordon Brown not in 2006 sold Westinghouse, a reactor maker, then part of state-owned British Nuclear Fuels. The sale raised billions of pounds but the timing was questioned, with the global market looking set for a new period of growth. It means the UK will never own the intellectual property of its new fleet of reactors. In Britain, with the energy bill designed to promote investment in low-carbon sources of power, the government now has a chance to set the right course to help support domestic industries. In renewables, there are signs of recent progress. The country's total wind industry has expanded by a quarter over the past two years and now provides full-time employment for 12,200 people. And, despite the country having sold its potential national nuclear champion, many believe there are opportunities to create jobs with a legacy. Some 60-70 per cent of the civil engineering work on the new plants can be done in the UK. According to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research for EDF Energy, this would deliver, on average, 22,500 direct and indirect jobs per year, assuming up to 18GW in new atomic power is generated. Experts such as Malcolm Grimston, honorary senior research fellow at Imperial College, also make the point that the "internationalisation" of the nuclear sector is "a very positive thing," bringing with it economies of scale. British politicians, constantly challenged on their lack of a coherent industrial policy, must now make some difficult choices. Do they want their giant energy investment to be the cause for celebration for exporters based abroad, or the springboard to create new exporters based in the UK? Sylvia Pfeifer is a Financial Times Special Correspondent. John Authers is away