I commented previously on gas prices, price caps and reckless pricing. I thought it best to check how much my utility bills (gas plus electric prices) have gone up since I last changed supplier to Telecom Plus 8 years ago. My bill totals have gone up by 63% over that period whereas the Retail Price Index has only gone up by 23%. Extra roof insulation and cavity wall insulation was done before the start of that period and the number of residents has not changed. So that’s a substantial increase over RPI in total charges.
How much is that increase down to subsidies that we all pay to encourage low carbon electricity production (such as wind farms) and how much to the worldwide change in gas prices?
According to Lee Drummee, an analyst at Cornwall Insight, in 2020 over 30% of the typical electricity bill was accounted for by renewable subsidies and policies. In other words, much of the excess increase in utility bills over RPI has been caused by Government low carbon policies.
The price of natural gas on worldwide markets has gone up by 48% in the same period, but the market price for gas is extremely volatile. It was almost as high as it is now in February 2014 (see https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas). On a longer term view, the market price of natural gas does not explain the increase in my utility bill over the last eight years.
Lord Matt Ridley has recently published a very good article on the energy crisis. It includes this comment: “It is almost tragi-comic that this crisis is happening while Boris Johnson is in New York, futilely trying to persuade an incredulous world to join us in committing eco self-harm by adopting a rigid policy of net zero by 2050 – a target that is almost certainly not achievable without deeply hurting the British economy and the lives of ordinary people, and which will only make the slightest difference to the climate anyway, given that the UK produces a meagre 1 per cent of global emissions”.
He also suggests the UK could have been self-sufficient in gas if we had not banned fracking with this comment: “We, meanwhile, decided to kowtow to organisations like Friends of the Earth, which despite being told by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw misleading claims about the extraction of shale gas, embarked on a campaign of misinformation, demanding ever more regulatory hurdles from an all-too-willing civil service”. I saw no reason to ban fracking so long as it was well regulated.
See Ridley’s blog here: https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-root-of-the-energy-crisis/
Meanwhile the Global Warming Policy Foundation has explained how Parliament was misled over the cost of the net zero carbon emission target we are aiming for by 2050. It’s worth reading here: https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-change-committee-misled-parliament-about-the-cost-of-net-zero/
It certainly appears to me that Government policies on these matters have been seriously misinformed. They have been driven by eco-fanaticism from those who think they can save the world from extinction by adopting extreme policies.
Meanwhile, and as I have said before, controlling the growth in population is the only sure way to reduce emissions and improve the environment. Our Government has done nothing about that issue at all, and few other Governments had done anything about it either.
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