Net zero crusader Ed Miliband is taking us all for fools… and ignoring REAL reason Britain’s energy bills are so high
JUST how stupid does Ed Miliband think we are?
Almost everyone can see that the Government’s energy policies are condemning Britain to the highest electricity prices in the world, and that this is contributing to the severe crisis in the steel and other heavy industries.
Yet still he tries to claim that anyone pointing this out is “spreading nonsense and lies to pursue their ideological agenda”.
The one with the ideological agenda is, of course, the Energy Secretary himself.
Not content with undermining our industries and imposing huge unnecessary costs on households, he wants to go even further.
Writing in a newspaper at the weekend, he promised he would react to the steel crisis by “doubling down” on his green policies.
According to Miliband, electricity prices are so high in Britain because we are so reliant on gas, the price of which he likes to imagine is set by scheming “fossil fuel dictators”.
Therefore, if we close down our gas power stations and replace them with wind and solar farms, we will enjoy much cheaper and more reliable energy.
Sorry, but Ed’s claim does not stand up to analysis.
Britain already generates far more of its electricity from wind and solar — 32.7 per cent in 2023 — than most countries.
Among highly-populated industrialised nations, only Germany (39.5 per cent), Spain (40.5 per cent), Netherlands (41 per cent) and Denmark (67 per cent) outdid us.
The US, by contrast, derives only 15.6 per cent of electricity from wind and solar.
While we still generate a significant proportion of our electricity from gas — 34.2 per cent in 2023 — many other countries are even more dependent on gas.
The US, for example, generated 42.4 per cent of its electricity in 2023 by this method.
In Italy it was 45.1 per cent and in the Netherlands it was 37.7 per cent.
So why, when according to Miliband we are doing all the right things, do we have the highest electricity prices of any member state of the International Energy Agency?
In 2023, UK industries paid an average of 25.85 pence per kilowatt-hour for their electricity. In the US they paid just 6.48 pence.
The reason we pay so much is directly thanks to government energy policy.
We pay a lot to generate electricity from gas because we are using it in short bursts at short notice to make up for a shortfall in power from wind and solar plants.
If we kept gas plants running continuously, the per unit cost would be far lower.
Moreover, we pay a lot more for our gas than US consumers do because the Government has choked off what had been a promising UK fracking industry.
And it has subjected what remains of the North Sea industry to punitive “windfall” taxes — levies which seem to increase even when the industry is clearly not enjoying a windfall.
As a result, we are forced to import more and more of our gas by ship from the US in the form of liquified natural gas.
As well as contributing to higher global greenhouse gas emissions, this is a lot more expensive than consuming locally produced gas because the process of liquifying and then regasifying it consumes around a tenth of the energy in the gas itself.
On top of that, Britain’s electricity market works on a mad principle known as marginal cost pricing — where all electricity is paid for at the price charged by the highest-cost producer.
For example, if a wind farm offers to produce electricity for £50 per kilowatt-hour and a gas plant £80 per kilowatt-hour, the wind farm as well as the gas plant will be paid £80 per kilowatt-hour.
The cost of generating electricity from wind and solar may appear to be low, but when you try to run a grid with high levels of intermittent wind and solar energy, you also need to take account of the costs of back-up.
If we did not have gas plants to switch on and off at short notice we would be paying through the nose even more to store electricity in batteries to cope with cloudy and windless days.
Failing us
To store a unit of electrical energy in a lithium battery currently costs around four times as much as it does to generate it in the first place.
On other days, wind and solar are producing far too much energy.
Consumers are already paying a fortune — £1.5billion last year — to compensate wind and solar farm owners when they are generating too much electricity to be fed into the grid.
This is set to mushroom in future as more wind and solar farms open.
As trade body UK Steel has pointed out, UK consumers also face far higher network costs than do those in comparable countries.
These are sure to rise further in coming years as the national grid is reconfigured to cope with the remote location of many wind and solar farms.
These, then, are the reasons why our electricity is so expensive.
It is not ideological to point out how Britain’s energy policy is failing us, and how Miliband’s zealous pursuit of Net Zero targets is making it even worse.
It is simply a case of quoting the facts, which are there for anyone who is interested in them to see.
Sadly, Miliband himself seems to have no such curiosity.