NET zero targets have already finished off Britain’s primary steel industry, but at least we still have an ample supply of brass – in Ed Miliband’s neck.
Responding to today’s news that the Ofgem price cap is going to rise in April by 6.4 per cent, adding £111 a year to the average household bill, he declared that it is all the fault of “petrostates and dictators”.
GettyEd Miliband last year rashly promised that he would cut our energy bills by £300 a year[/caption]
GettyThe average household will fork out an extra £111 a year on energy bills[/caption]
ReutersDon’t look to foreign dictators like Putin to know why your energy bills are rising[/caption]
Energy bills will rise for millions of households this spring
Of course, it is nothing to do with Miliband himself, who last year rashly promised that he would cut our energy bills by £300 a year by aggressively moving towards zero carbon electricity by 2030.
It is nothing to do with Britain’s net zero target, that was nodded through Parliament in the dying days of Theresa May’s government without even a vote.
It is all to do with Vladimir Putin and the sheikhs sitting in their gilded palaces in the Gulf states, throwing UK households to the wolves in their search for personal enrichment.
Actually, the world’s largest gas producer by some margin is the United States, which isn’t a dictatorship even if the liberal left might seem to think it is following the defeat of their preferred candidate in last November’s presidential election.
Moreover, Britain still manages to derive half its own gas from the North Sea.
We could very likely be producing all of it had governments over the past decade encouraged the exploitation of shale gas reserves found under Lancashire and elsewhere.
Instead, companies which were eager to extract the fuel have been banned from doing so.
Miliband personally delivered the final blow to Britain’s shale gas industry this week by ordering exploratory wells to be filled with concrete.
So, no, it isn’t dictators which have lumbered Britain with the highest gas and electricity prices of any member country of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The real reason we pay an average of 36.39 pence per unit for our electricity while US households pay the equivalent of 12.86 pence is down to failures of UK energy policy.
Miliband, to be fair, is not the sole author of it – the previous Conservative government is as much to blame.
But he has set us on a path which will lead inevitably to even higher energy prices.
By the end of this Parliament, Ed’s promise to save us £300 a year is going to be a huge millstone around the government’s neck – heavier even than the infamous ‘Edstone’ into which he carved his pledges for the 2015 election, before crashing to defeat.
Miliband still seems to think that generating our electricity from wind and solar is cheaper than using fossil fuels.
Yet Britain has already embraced wind and solar more enthusiastically than virtually any other major Western country – only Portugal and Ireland narrowly exceeded the 28.1 per cent of our electricity we generated from wind in 2023. So why aren’t our bills falling?
AFPThe Ofgem price cap is set to rise in April by 6.4 per cent[/caption]
GettyThe more wind and solar farms Miliband builds, the higher this bill will rise[/caption]
Neither Miliband nor anyone else has solved the intermittency problem.
We still have no viable, affordable means of keeping the lights on when there is little wind and solar energy available.
At the moment we are using gas to make up the gaps, but it is very much more expensive to use gas in this way than it would be if we used gas power stations steadily.
An idle gas power station still has to be maintained and the owner still has to earn a return on the capital which has been invested.
So when a gas power station is turned on the per-unit cost of power is much higher.
If you want to know why your energy bills are rising, in other words, don’t look to foreign dictators – look to Miliband himself
The problem is compounded by something called ‘marginal cost pricing’, which means that the prices of all electricity being used at any one time is fixed by the most expensive form of energy.
So, if we have to pay a gas plant an astronomical sum to switch on for a couple of hours, all electricity will be charged at that rate.
When the wind is blowing strongly we have an opposite problem – there is far too much electricity being generated for the national grid to be able to cope.
So what happens then? Consumers are forced to pay ‘constraint payments’ to wind farm owners to compensate them for having to turn off their turbines.
In the first nine months of 2024 alone we collectively paid £1billion in this way.
This year, it is estimated that constraint payments will reach £1.8billion.
Divided between Britain’s 28million households it works out at £64 – and that is on top of other subsidies paid to green energy companies.
The more wind and solar farms Ed Miliband builds, the higher this bill will rise.
Unless, that is, someone discovers the holy grail of affordable energy storage, but even Miliband seems to have given up on that.
His latest plans for a ‘decarbonised’ electricity grid in 2030 envisage keeping just as many gas plants on standby as we have now.
If you want to know why your energy bills are rising, in other words, don’t look to foreign dictators – look to Miliband himself sitting in his Whitehall office, his toes no doubt toasted at taxpayers’ expense.
GettyMiliband has set us on a path which will lead inevitably to even higher energy prices[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
