FOR MONTHS, Bronterre News has repeatedly exposed a glaring injustice which is clobbering households throughout Britain with electricity bills £400 or £500 a year higher than justified.
Unless this scandalous anomaly is sorted out quickly, that excess will rise by hundreds of pounds more from this October, and again in January.
This autumn alone, the Ofgem energy price cap – the maximum suppliers can charge households – is predicted to rise by 65 per cent.
This of course will be on top of an unprecedented 54 per cent cap increase in April, which resulted in electricity prices in economically stressed mid and north Wales, and in several other parts of Britain, rising on average by a monumental 40 per cent.
Since April, we have been ramming home the message that the 40 per cent hike is almost three times higher than it should be given that the bulk of electricity – about 63 per cent – now comes from cheap renewables – wind, solar photovoltaic and hydro, and from nuclear plants, biomass and coal, with just 37 per cent or so generated by gas power-stations.
A simple calculation shows that, based on fuel mix used to generate electricity, the 40 per cent household electricity price rise should have been about 14 per cent, translating into bills lower by £400 to £500.
People on stretched incomes, and households dependent on mains electricity because they’re off-grid for gas, need to know all this if they’re going to clamour for energy justice, if they’re going to rattle the cages of MPs and , in Wales, Assembly members, who should eons ago have been looking beyond the parroted orthodoxy that continually rising energy prices are an unfortunate fact of life basically beyond remedy.
Certainly, the poor are being hung out to dry by politicians too sluggish to look deeper than the shamefully superficial press releases put out by the energy regulator, Ofgem, thus leaving themselves ill-equipped to take issue with, and to harangue, the UK government on fundamental and the little known cause of runaway electricity price rises.
But people are also being let down by too many journalists, and in particular by public service broadcasters, notably the BBC, who equally are failing to probe.
Why have these powerful voices not been shouting about the fact that electricity bills are being artificially, and seriously, inflated as a result of a little-known, and increasingly illogical and oppressive, wholesale market convention that allows gas – the most expensive fuel – to set the price for all forms of electricity generation?
Why have they not been demanding urgent severance of the link between the prices of gas and electricity – to the huge benefit of millions of households, – so that the wholesale price of gas ceases to determine the price of domestic electricity? It’s an archaic convention that must be scrapped, because most electricity now comes from low-cost renewables – wind, solar,hydro – and from nuclear, not from expensive and volatile gas.
Shamefully, the cheapness of renewables is not reflected in the extortionate price people pay for electricity. And, as always, it is the poor, abandoned by the rich and vocal to the inhumanities of the market-place, who are being ground down.
Finally, however, there is a sign that things may be moving in the right direction, with business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng announcing in mid-July that the government is “consulting” on “de-coupling costly global fossil fuel prices from electricity produced by cheaper renewables, a step to help ensure consumers are seeing cheaper prices as a result of lower-cost clean energy sources”.
The strong suspicion must be that this energy market reform will not be achieved, as it must be, quickly without maximum commitment and pressure from MPs, Assembly members and the media.We’re not holding our breath.
BBC’s and politicians’ disgraceful silence as poor ground down
SO WHY has Big Media been so supine, so wanting of fire its its collective, well-fed belly, over the prospect of household energy bills leaping this autumn to close on £3,300 a year, and why, in particular, has it failed to spot and seize on the dire effect on bills of the long outdated coupling of gas prices and electricity prices?
Consider the context. The bulk of senior journalists and news presenters at the BBC, for example, who should be looking well beyond the simplistic lines fed them by energy companies and by the regulator, are reacting not, as they should, like fizzing fireworks, but with the feebleness of damp squibs.
So what’s been holding them back? Fundamentally, their own astronomically high pay. Like the career politicians with whom they rub shoulders, they are so well off the anxiety and dejection of the increasing numbers of their viewers and listeners who are on, or approaching, the breadline are really of little interest.
The typical annual energy – gas and electricity – bill is now about £2,000 a year. That figure is set to rise to £3,240 a year from this October, and to £3,363 from January.
Such outgoings are chicken-feed for a goodly number of presenters and reporters working for BBC programmes such as Today, PM, World at One and Newsnight. None are paid less than about £250,000 a year, a good number £300,000 or more.
They will not themselves lose a moment’s sleep over rocketing energy bills, and the effort of will needed for them to identify with people facing a long winter in underheated, or literally unheated, homes is clearly not being made.
If they were personally struggling against the odds to make ends meet, or if they made themselves feel for the plight in which society’s underdogs find themselves, it would be a different story. Then you might well have seen all the stops pulled out to expose the searing tale of Britain’s scorching electricity bills.
Bronterre News 