With average energy bills set to double to £2,000 next year, it makes sense that the Government should cut 5 percent VAT on household power to help us cope with a massive price hike that could push 1.5 million of us into fuel poverty.
Increased winter fuel allowances and relaxation of green levies could help those most vulnerable to plunging temperatures and rocketing bills. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng met energy bosses on Monday and the news was dire.
Wholesale energy prices are peaking just as storage facilities are at their lowest for years and wind power generation has hit a ten-year low, falling by 15 percent this year despite there being more turbines.
Russia playing politics with gas supply lines has not helped, just as the EU and UK are embracing a Net- Zero policy that puts all their eggs in a renewables basket.
It’s a perfect storm that is going to hit consumers and industry hard next spring when price caps are raised by Ofgem.
Already 30 energy suppliers have collapsed this year in the UK and many experts say this is only the beginning of an energy crisis similar to 2008’s financial crash that rocked the world.
If Boris Johnson has seen his approval ratings dip recently, they’ll go into freefall when we receive our inflated household fuel bills in April, yet this has been a crisis waiting to happen.
Governments across Europe should have been preparing for it but buried their heads in the sand, preferring ideology over common sense.
Even the USA, a net exporter of energy just a few years ago, has seen President Joe Biden forced to beg Arab states to pump more oil to bring down gas pump prices at home or face annihilation in next year’s midterm elections.
The UK, however, appears to have been more blind than other nations, and for longer, to the problems we now face.
Energy expert Clive Moffatt has warned governments since 2010 to take a more balanced approach to decarbonization, but a Conservative fixation with green targets has skewed their judgment.
“We were getting the message very clearly from [government] officials they were very reluctant to endorse any possibility there was even a medium-term future for natural gas,” he says.
But with North Sea production of gas and oil going down and imports going up “we become extremely vulnerable,” says Moffatt.
Add to that a plunging energy storage capability of just 1.7 percent when anything goes wrong with European pipelines or failing renewables, and our present crisis was inevitable whatever else was going on in the world.
“You have to look at it in terms of carbon reduction, affordability and security,” says Moffatt. “You can’t simply dump two of those and focus on one. If you do that the least well off in society will suffer most.”
After ten years of such advice, you can’t say the Government wasn’t warned, and yet it merrily carried on its path towards Net Zero, depending more and more on importing energy to allow it to offshore its carbon emissions.
Despite shale gas being put on hold from 2019 and energy giants such as Shell discouraged from exploring the North Sea, the latest figures from National Grid ESO reveal that in 2021, we depended more on carbon energy to keep our lights on than in previous years.
Wind declined to 19 percent of our energy mix, while nuclear power fell by 10 percent to its lowest proportion since 1982. The gap was filled by natural gas which, of course, is now subject to rocketing international prices as we import almost twice as much from abroad.
FOR a nation that made its industrial wealth from lucky access to cheap carbon energy beneath our feet, it’s an energy policy that is unsustainable. As a result, our government is now having to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize power providers to lessen the impact on customers.
“Expecting consumers to shoulder that volatility without any support from government is unrealistic,” said Stephen Fitzpatrick, founder of Ovo Energy, this week. “It’s a £25billion hit to consumer spending.” Potentially the single biggest hurdle to growth next year, it could easily have been avoided by the government taking a longer-term common-sense approach to energy production.
Taking years to build up our storage capacity and a greater variety of energy generation, the Government is now left with little choice but to cut VAT, reduce green tariffs and widen winter fuel allowances or face a hurricane of resentment from voters.
Read rest at Daily Express
This part of the article above :
Potentially the single biggest hurdle to growth next year, it could easily have been avoided by the government taking a longer-term common-sense approach to energy production.
This highlights the two main faults with most governments today. ”
Common sense and long-term thinking”.
These normal human functions do not exist in governments in any country. We get stupid stuff like we hear from Boris – the man who had government in the palm of his hands thanks to Brexit, went off with the pixies and look where GB is today. What a bloody disgrace. He needs a swift kick in the you-know-where! So smart yet so bloody stupid.
Here’s a free tip for you Boris, turn on your coal power stations and get going with new nuclear plants – ASAP. And for goodness sake, forget about windmills and shiny mirrors because they don’t work.
I’m surprised BJ has not introduced Faith Healing and Homeopathy to the NHS: both ideas on a par with Global Warming and/or Climate Change via CO2.
Maybe we should now have him adjust the Law of Gravity, so that we can fly around by flapping our arms and so not need cars, aircraft or even ships and similar energy guzzling equipment. Ship him off to Mars or the Moon, where his Paradise is, with no Global Warming at all.
A very dangerous Cult of Liberal Enviromentalism
Russia is not playing politics. Russia has stopped the Gas supply to Ukraine because Ukraine does not pay it’s bills. Germany is receiving the same amount of Gas from Russia but Germany is piping Gas to Ukraine via Poland. Gas is therfore in short supply so the price goes up. EU leaders and energy companies are lying.
Pay Higher Fuel prices all over a fake Threat of Global warming/Climate Change
Totally stunned with world “leaders” like Johnson have no concern for their people. To me it seems they want headlines, be the latest with the craziest without any consideration for the ordinary people. Every conference on climate seems to be tagged with words like elites, private jets, movie stars etc. They already have the resources to pay or winter in the warmer places. Never heard anyone ever sit down with a knowledgeable working person and ask them about their situation that the elites have created. Reasonably sure they don’t even care.
While reading this post, I remembered the old joke about life being like a sh!te sandwich, the more bread you have, the less sh!te you have to eat. The elites are insulated with their wealth. They don’t have to choose between food or heat. Politicians like BoJo should be publicly stripped to their skivies and tossed into the snow. I do not understand their lack of humility.
They are abject failures.