Rising energy bills expose Miliband’s fantasy economics - "Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, promised us that he would take at least £300 off the average energy bill... We learnt on Friday that the energy price cap is going up yet again. In reality, the relentlessly rising cost of energy is exposing Miliband’s fantasy economics – and unless policy changes very soon, that is going to turn into a full-scale crisis. Labour made very few promises during last year’s election campaign, but on two points it was completely clear. It would not raise any of the three main taxes, and it would cut average power bills by £300 per household... In the background, the price of oil has been collapsing, falling to just $57 (£43.50) a barrel, down from $80 back in January. Wholesale energy prices have been going down, and are now 4pc lower over the last three months... Ofgem is perfectly open about the reason for the increase. It “is driven by government policy costs and operating costs”, it admitted as it announced the increase... The price rise is not driven by global prices, or even by domestic supply and demand. It is entirely the fault of Miliband. There are two big problems with that. First, he completely misled everyone during the election. A reduction in energy bills was not a minor footnote or a passing remark that no one paid very much attention to. It was central to the Labour Party’s entire campaign at last year’s election, repeated again and again. Despite that, it turns out that neither Miliband nor anyone else in his party had the faintest clue about how to deliver that once they were in power. Next, and more seriously, his demented green policies are now directly pushing up prices. Expanding our nuclear capacity is a good idea, but the fact remains that cumbersome planning restrictions mean that building a new plant costs twice as much as it does in France and four times as much as in South Korea. If we could build a new nuclear facility at the same price as other countries can, then prices would not need to rise by so much. Likewise, the Warm Home Discount is just another form of welfare payment to lower income households, and while that might or might not be justifiable, it would surely be better to pay for that through general taxation instead of just whacking a bit more on everyone else’s bills. It will get worse. The Government is pressing ahead with its “boiler tax”, which will mean extra costs for anyone who is unlucky enough to have their heating system pack up over the winter. And it is doubling down on wind power, handing out lavish subsidies to the industry that will have to be paid for years to come, even as it becomes alarmingly obvious to everyone that wind is not nearly reliable enough. The grid can’t cope with it, and costs are not coming under control in the way you would expect (indeed, it is looking as if solar is the far more cost effective option for green energy). Meanwhile, we are still running down our oil and gas industry in the North Sea, even though there are plentiful resources left to supply our own needs. In reality, Miliband has lost control of the energy market. Right now, the UK needs a complete reset. That should mean two major changes. To start with, we need to drop the green targets. The UK has already more than halved its carbon emissions, and we account for less than 1pc of the global total. At the rate we are deindustrialising – and ExxonMobil closed a major chemicals plant in Scotland only last week, accelerating the decline of manufacturing – it will soon be even lower. The priority right now is cheaper energy, not greener. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from wind, solar, gas, nuclear or even fossil fuels – it just needs to cost much, much less. Next, we should drop the absurd system of price caps and controls. It is not helping anyone. We should have a plentiful supply of energy and then we should leave it to the market to decide which companies deliver it to people’s homes... Energy is getting more and more expensive, and the Government is to blame for that – and unless it changes course sooner or later we are all going to freeze to death."
Time to blame "greedy companies"!
Ed Miliband’s gaslighting over energy bills has just been exposed - "in the 20 years before Covid and the Ukraine war, gas prices were both low and stable, yet household spending on electricity grew consistently from 2006 onwards, diverging strongly from wholesale prices. This was driven primarily by policy costs and the drive to net zero (although it was not called that until later). I calculated that we have spent almost £220bn in today’s money on decarbonising the energy market. I also pointed out that, rather than lower bills, even the Climate Change Committee says we are unlikely to see any savings from net zero before the seventh carbon budget period, which is 2038-42. So much for Labour’s promises to cut £300 from bills by 2030. Policy costs were once again the drivers of the latest increase in the price cap. Ofgem, the energy regulator responsible for setting the cap, said that the increase was largely the result of the cost of turning off renewable power generators, mainly wind farms, when the grid was too congested to cope and the increase in the Warm Homes Discount (WHD). Curtailment, as the switch-off payments are known, is a result of the way in which renewables are subsidised. Wind farms are entitled to be paid whenever they are able to generate, so if the electricity they produce cannot be used for any reason and they are asked to turn down production, they are compensated for the lost income. Even if a generator has not activated its subsidy, it would be compensated through the balancing process, which is used to keep supply and demand in equilibrium. Usually the balancing mechanism is used to fine tune the system, to replace generation that is lost due to an unexpected trip or outage of a power station or power line, or to manage local grid constraints. However, in the case of wind it is used to manage large transmission bottlenecks. These bottlenecks exist because of the way net zero is changing our grid. The system was originally designed with the intention that power stations would be located closer to consumers. Yet wind farms are built where it’s windy, which tends to be in remote places that require new grid infrastructure to be built in order to fully use their output. Under a policy known as “connect and manage”, the priority has been to connect new renewable generation and worry about grid infrastructure later. Unfortunately, this policy has been pursued without any limits, meaning wind farms have been built in full knowledge that the bulk of their output cannot be used. A prime example of this is the Seagreen offshore wind farm in the Scottish North Sea, which opened in 2023. Almost two thirds of its output was curtailed in 2024. When curtailment occurs, consumers not only pay a wind farm not to generate but also pay a gas power station downstream of the bottleneck to generate the electricity needed. This means consumers end up paying twice – the wholesale cost of that electricity is effectively doubled, with an extra lump on top for whatever other subsidy the wind farm might be entitled to. The cost of curtailment now amounts to just under £2bn per year and is expected to keep growing. Neso forecasts it will be as much as £3.7bn by 2030... Things are not going to get better because future price caps will include levies for nuclear power stations, in particular Sizewell C, which has just been approved by Miliband. Then there is carbon capture and storage. The Energy Secretary plans to recover much of the £22bn earmarked for investment in this unproven technology through bills. Elsewhere, government plans to harmonise carbon prices with Europe have already caused bills to increase, with further rises expected when the harmonisation takes effect. As gas prices fall, it is increasingly difficult for Labour to continue to blame the fuel for rising household energy bills. Gas is explicitly not the reason for the latest increase in the price cap – government policy is. Miliband and his Cabinet colleagues need to stop gaslighting the public over the cost of energy and have the courage of their convictions. If they are convinced these additional levies and costs are justified, then the Government should make the case transparently, rather than hiding behind tired old narratives that no longer apply."
Time to blame greedy companies, because everyone knows that renewables are cheaper
Ed Miliband’s offshore wind dream in tatters as industry pushes for more cash - "the burden will fall on consumers whose energy bills are surging under the ever-growing weight of levies needed to underwrite the cost of building swathes of renewables. For the average household, renewable subsidies already add £185 a year to their bills. In the future, as new renewables projects grind into life, each claiming its own extra subsidy, the levies will grow and bills will go up. Yet, the repercussions are also political. Because Miliband decided to accelerate all things green – especially decarbonisation of the grid – he smashed apart a delicate consensus. For two decades, Britain’s main political parties had disagreed on almost everything except climate change. The threat it presented was seen as existential, and net zero was the solution that united all parties. That is no longer the case. The backlash to Miliband’s clean power plan has led to deep party lines on the issue. It was too much for the Conservatives, who rejected first the policy and then the whole idea of net zero by 2050. It also opened the door for Reform UK, the party that has made opposition to net zero a centrepiece of its campaigning, alongside immigration"
Ed Miliband ‘refused to leave energy brief’ in reshuffle - "Mr Miliband’s success in refusing to budge underscores his enduring influence in the Labour Party, where he is seen as a champion of the “soft Left” around the Cabinet table... The growing backlash has made net zero one of the most divisive subjects in politics, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK aiming to make it one of two key battlegrounds along with immigration at the next election. Mr Farage has predicted green energy could become the “new Brexit” and has pledged to scrap the Government’s commitment to meet net zero carbon emissions by 2050. “Everyone can see the logic now”, he told The Sun in April. “Why would you export manufacturing and then re-import the goods? All you’ve done is you’ve exported CO2 emissions and actually added to them in many cases. “The lunacy of this. This could be the next Brexit – where Parliament is so hopelessly out of touch with the country.”"
Keir Starmer overrules Ed Miliband to snub net zero project - "Sir Keir Starmer has overruled Ed Miliband by snubbing plans for a green energy plant in a major blow to the Energy Secretary’s net zero plans. The Prime Minister has effectively closed the door on the construction of a major hydrogen project on Teesside – believed to be backed by Mr Miliband – by deciding to endorse a rival tech development near the site, according to correspondence seen by The Telegraph. The H2Teesside plan, proposed by BP, would have produced so-called “blue” hydrogen that could have provided up to 10pc of the supply Mr Miliband has said Britain would need by 2030. However, the plan clashes with proposals on nearby land for Europe’s largest data centre – backed by Teesworks, the public-private partnership supported by Tees Valley mayor Lord Houchen... BP has said it remained committed to the project and that it remained in talks with the Government. It has admitted that it does not have a primary customer lined up for the hydrogen plant but has said the project should not be blocked by “speculative development”. Sir Keir is keen to show he is committed to Britain’s AI goals, which are expected to be at the centre of a “technology partnership” agreed with Donald Trump, the US president, next week. The Teesworks site has the potential for a data centre with more than a gigawatt of computing power, which would make it Britain’s largest site and potentially turbocharge hopes of developing and running advanced AI systems in Britain."
Ed Miliband’s mad net zero crusade has suffered a fatal blow - "Keir Starmer may ditch Ed Miliband’s mad plans to completely decarbonise our electricity system by 2030, because it has finally dawned on Downing Street that a mad dash to build wind and solar is only going to push up everyone’s energy bills, not bring them down by £300 as Ed promised. Just look at Ed’s latest wind auction. He is about to buy record amounts of offshore wind at eye-wateringly high prices, after extending the contracts to twenty years. This is like swapping a 4 per cent variable mortgage for a 20-year fixed rate at 10 per cent. Sure, our bills will be less volatile – but in exchange we’ll be locked into paying much higher prices for much longer. Hardly the genius bill-cutting policy that Labour had us believe. Next, Tony Blair’s think-tank copied my plan to call time on Ed’s botched wind auction, reduce carbon taxes, and put cheap energy first. They do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Last, and perhaps most damning of all, energy bosses from the country’s biggest suppliers told Parliament that even if gas itself was free, bills would still go up by 2030 because of the soaring costs of Ed’s plans. As I’ve been arguing, gas is not the problem. It’s all the extra costs of renewables – including the farce of paying wind farms to switch off when it’s too windy – that are piling on the pain. My approach is simple. Our energy policy should have a single-minded focus on the biggest problem we face. We have the highest electricity prices in the world. We need radical change to bring those prices down fast. If not, Britain will lose out on the growth we’d get from industry and AI, and families will continue to struggle with the cost of living from sky-high energy bills... scrap Ed’s old rip-off wind farm subsidies. Back in 2008, when he had his first chance to ruin our energy system, Miliband in his infinite wisdom decided to double the subsidies on offer for offshore wind farms. That means that when the wind blows there are wind farms receiving up to three times the market price of electricity – and you are paying for that through your energy bills. These two policies together would cut everyone’s electricity bills instantly by 20 per cent. We are the only party with a serious plan to cut bills. Ed’s infamous “cut bills by £300” report has been disowned by Ember, the think tank it originally came from."
Weird. Climate change hystericists keep claiming that the price of electricity is tied to the highest gas price, so it's not the fault of renewables (when they don't understand base load)
Lloyd’s of London reverses net zero ban - "The new boss of Lloyd’s of London has scrapped the insurance market’s net zero policies amid a backlash led by Donald Trump against pro-green financing. Patrick Tiernan, who took over as chief executive this summer, said insurers who operate at Lloyd’s will no longer be expected to hit targets requiring them to stop insuring the most polluting fossil fuel projects within the next five years."
Funerals should comply with net zero, says Labour - "Labour is plotting to make UK crematoria greener by banning gas cremation ovens and forcing grieving families to choose eco-friendly wicker or bamboo coffins... There is, however, a downside to cremations powered by electricity which is that they take much longer. Cremations in gas ovens “range from as little as 50 minutes to more than 2 hours, depending upon body size”, but “cremation times on electric cremators are longer”, the guidelines warn. Industry estimates suggest that cremating a large corpse would take up to three hours in a crematorium powered by low carbon electricity – twice as long as with gas... The costs could however be huge. Mr Birkinshaw estimates it will cost the industry £18m or £55,000 for each crematorium, just to fit equipment to remove nitrous oxides"
People are beginning to realise the truth about Net Zero - "A YouGov opinion poll reveals plummeting support for net-zero policies in all age groups, accompanied by a sharp rise in the number of people who think the threat of climate change is exaggerated. Ed Miliband’s fanaticism, Greta Thunberg’s rage and Just Stop Oil’s vandalism are not just failing to persuade us; they are backfiring. We “lukewarmers”, who have argued for years that the scientific evidence does not justify even the mildest panic about the slowly changing climate, have until recently been shouting into the wind. Exaggerated alarm has been too popular, lucrative and convenient for politicians. Tory, Labour and Lib Dem fell over each other to preach the apocalypse because: first, doom-mongering always goes down well with voters; second, it drew in donations and supplied post-seat-loss career opportunities; and third, it provided the perfect excuse for their own mistakes: fail to build flood defences or prevent moorland fires? Just blame climate change! But now the public is getting sceptical, all but the greenest politicians will catch on and follow suit. According to the new poll, the number of people who think the threat has been exaggerated has jumped from 16 per cent to 25 per cent in just four years – which makes for a tempting slice of the electorate. Solid and growing majorities now object to restricting our access to gas boilers, petrol or diesel cars, holiday flights and red meat. As the cost of Net Zero begins to really bite, and the lie that it will pay for itself is exposed, those numbers will only grow. Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, said recently that unless we find a way to lower our world-beating electricity prices in Britain, “support for net zero is going to collapse.” Remember this growing scepticism is happening while the BBC, by far the most dominant voice in the media, relentlessly relays the views of the exaggerators who say climate change will kill billions and wreck the planet, sexing up every heatwave into a thermal cataclysm. It also imposes a near total ban on allowing anybody even to discuss the lukewarmer view, let alone the full-fat “it’s a hoax” version of climate scepticism. Imagine how many would turn sceptical if Auntie let people like Dick Lindzen back on the airwaves. “It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was deemed for a time to be a deadly poison,” he says. Who he? Only one of the world’s leading climate scientists who was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the world’s top university. For 40 years now we have been told to expect Climageddon yet scare after scare has been a damp squib. According to Al Gore, the Arctic Ocean was supposed to be free of ice by 2013, twelve years ago (even the scientist he was supposedly quoting rebuked him for that one). Next week it will reach its annual minimum extent and there is almost 30 per cent more ice (4.6 million square kilometres of the stuff) than on the same date in 2012 and 10 per cent more than in 2007. Storms, floods and droughts show no sign of getting significantly worse on a global scale – to the frustration of activists who are forced to resort to models of the future instead of data. Sea level is inching up by about a foot per century. The most measurable effects of warming are that winter nights are a bit milder and deserts a bit greener. No wonder people are starting to think that even if climate is changing, and even if it is man-made (which it most probably is), then maybe it will be cheaper to adapt to it than try to prevent it. Especially given that America, China and India are not prepared to pay through the nose for electricity in the vain hope of stopping the warming while we generate a mere 0.8 per cent of global emissions. The realistic scientific models have never predicted catastrophe. They say that climate change will make the much richer people of 2100 slightly less rich – but still much richer than today. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “middle of the road” scenario, the average person on Earth could be 4.5 times as well off in 2100 without climate change but 4.3 times because of the cost of climate change. Is more than quadrupling your income really a catastrophe?"
The headlong rush to net zero must stop before we are all ruined - "electricity suppliers warned that green levies are set to increase household energy bills by £300 per year. Even if the wholesale price of electricity halves, this would still be a net rise of £150. Now we learn that the supposed “clean energy jobs boom” promised by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is to be achieved in large part by rebranding plumbers, electricians and welders as “clean energy workers”. Jürgen Maier, the boss of GB Energy, meanwhile, believes it could take 20 years to create the 1,000 jobs at its Scottish headquarters promised by Sir Keir Starmer... Just as the answer to a lack of green jobs is a hasty recategorisation, one answer to the prospect of people balking at the higher energy bills implied by decarbonisation reportedly under consideration may be to shift the costs from bills to taxes. Yet shifting the burden of costs does not address the core problem, just as shifting emissions from Britain to exporting nations does not address climate change: we appear to be creating a more expensive energy system in the pursuit of a cheaper one, and quite probably a less reliable one to boot. At some stage, the real world implications of this approach must surely be considered."
Damn greedy companies! Everyone knows that renewable energy is cheaper!
British industry is now in terminal decline, killed by expensive energy - "1952... British car production has now fallen all the way back to levels last seen that year. Likewise, cement production is back to 1950s levels as well. Industry is collapsing all around us – and that is rapidly turning into a national emergency. According to the latest figures from the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the number of cars made in the UK fell by another 35pc last month, hitting a 73-year low. The cyber attack that shut the lines at Jaguar Land Rover triggered the latest fall, but it has been steadily declining for years now. Likewise, last month the Mineral Products Association reported that cement production had fallen to 1950s levels. The tyre manufacturer Pirelli last week said it was “temporarily” closing two tyre factories in Staffordshire and Cumbria. Funnily enough, it turns out that when you don’t make any cars you don’t need many tyres either. At the end of September, Wedgewood suspended production at its factory for 90 days. The list goes on and on. With every week that passes, another couple of factories close their doors. The UK is experiencing a wave of deindustrialisation that is unprecedented in any developed country. And yet if you rewind by only a few years, Britain had a healthy manufacturing sector. It accounted for 12 per cent of GDP, a similar level to countries such as France, and with world-class niches such as chemicals, defence and life sciences. It was profitable, and sustained lots of well-paid blue collar jobs. It is perfectly clear what has gone wrong. Our obsession with Net Zero targets has left us with industrial energy prices that are twice those in France, and four times the US. The government has piled on extra taxes, from extra National Insurance for employers, to carbon levies, to landfill taxes that hit manufacturers harder than anyone. And planning rules make it impossible to build plants where they are needed. Add it all up, and the UK has become an impossible place to make anything. Factories that survived a couple of world wars, the inflationary turmoil of the 1970s, and the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s, are finally giving up... Once factories close down, we should not kid ourselves that they are ever going to re-open. The skilled workforce will have moved on to other jobs, or else taken early retirement. Likewise, once market share is sacrificed, we shouldn’t expect it ever to be clawed back again. Manufacturing is a fiercely competitive global industry, with Chinese companies taking more and more of the market and rising countries such as Vietnam or India expanding rapidly all the time. The US, behind its new tariff wall, is turning itself into a manufacturing nation again. There will be plenty of foreign rivals stepping into every market that British companies are forced out of. By the time we get around to lowering our energy costs, or cutting some of the carbon levies, it will be too late. The industrial base will be lost forever. All we get right now are short-term, half-baked measures. Half the steel industry has already been taken into effective state control, and will be kept alive with subsidies at least for a year or two. The auto manufacturers have been offered loans, although it is a mystery how they will ever be paid back. That is not even close to good enough. Instead, the government needs to recognise that the accelerating collapse of manufacturing is a national emergency. It needs to lower energy costs, and if that means re-opening the North Sea or even fracking, so be it. It needs to scale back the carbon levies, and lower employment taxes. There is not a major developed economy in the world that does not manufacture – but right now, Britain looks set to become not just the first country to industrialise, but the first to completely de-industrialise as well."
THE ISLANDER on X - "Britain, gutted. The first nation to industrialize is now being euthanized by its own elites, car production back to 1952 levels, cement output collapsed, and entire industries shut down as Net Zero fanatics torch the last working furnaces in the name of green orthodoxy. But hey let's turbo charge de-industrialization with more boomerang sanctions on Russia. Energy prices in Britain are now double France’s and four times that of the U.S. And this didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of ideological sabotage, Net Zero dogma imposed by unelected technocrats and frontmen like Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband, and the entire WEF-Atlanticist class. These are the same people who banned fracking, throttled the North Sea, piled on carbon taxes, and then watched as centuries-old factories, some that survived both world wars, went dark. Meanwhile, half of the UK’s steel industry has already been nationalized just to keep the lights on a little longer. Jaguar Land Rover was paralyzed by a cyberattack, but that was just the coup de grace. The rot set in long before, from policy, not sabotage. Even Pirelli is shutting down in Britain, because when you kill car manufacturing, you kill tires, cement, glass, and jobs. A domino collapse. And yet, billions are still being siphoned abroad to fund proxy wars, military aid, and regime change fantasies in Russia via sacrificial Ukraine. Britain can’t keep its own factories open, but it has endless cash for NATO adventures and offshore oligarchy. Brits are freezing in the dark while bureaucrats play empire. That’s the real “Global Britain.” Let’s be clear: there is no modern power that survives deindustrialization. Germany is in lockstep. America is decimating it with tariffs. Russia, after years of sanctions, reindustrialized under pressure, it now builds, refines, and exports with growing self-sufficiency. Putin just boosted defense-industrial output by 35%. They chose sovereignty. The UK chose servitude. And once these British factories close, they’re never coming back. Skilled workers vanish, supply chains dissolve, and market share is devoured by China, Vietnam, India— even the U.S. now behind its new industrial tariff wall. This is the final surrender. So let’s stop pretending. This isn’t economic mismanagement, it’s policy-driven demolition. Engineered by globalist elites and their favourite puppets in Britain's political class. There’s no “build back better” without acknowledging and holding accountable who tore it down."
Bernie on X - "Energy bills are now so high that household debts are at £6 BILLION. The cost of bad debt It’s passed on to the rest of us through higher prices. under net zero policies, energy prices are not coming down, they’re only going up! Meaning more bad debt…. …And it repeats 🤡"
Time to blame "greedy companies"!
Claudia Webbe on X - "Your home is not cold because of refugees. Your bills are not high because of refugees. Your low wages are not because of refugees. Hate corporate profits. Not people"
Alastair Mellon SDP on X - "Your home is cold because your energy bills are high. Your energy bills are high because the Labour energy secretary introduced net zero charges in 2005 which make up a huge proportion of your bill. Even if gas were free, your bill would still still go up this year. The Conservatives went along with it. Our energy green paper explains how electricity increased in price in real terms by 300% since 2005 and brought about a collapse in British productivity. If our electricity prices were the same in real terms as they were in 2005 the economy would be 11% bigger. So don’t blame Brexit; blame labour and the conservatives for their insane energy policies. Do you want to know how we would stabilise the grid? Do you want to know how we can have electricity priced fixed at 10p per kilowatt hour? It’s all in @sdphq ‘Energy Abundance’ https://sdp.org.uk/energy-abundance/ It’s all here 👆"
