Bronterre News

THE ludicrously profitable BT Group, together with its currently even more loaded subsidiary Openreach, is behaving quite disgracefully by claiming a need for spending constraint as a reason for trying to push through its new, and potentially life-endangering, internet-based telephones system.

  In June, our column in the Cambrian News described how the bullheaded plan by the telecoms behemoth to totally scrap landline phones by 2025 would leave untold numbers of isolated communities at dire risk of being unable to get help in an emergency. The danger was illustrated last winter, when a house in rural Scotland burnt down after its owner, a pensioner, had his dependable landline phone replaced by one of the wireless phones, which are linked with the broadband network and need mains electricity to work. The blaze broke out during a power-cut, and the area is without a mobile-phone signal. Landline phones work during power-cuts. Without his, the pensioner couldn’t call the fire brigade.

  The prospect of this kind of nightmare is now hovering over remote parts of rural Wales, which typically have little or no mobile signals and often suffer power-cuts. Moutainous Cwmystwyth, 16 miles from Aberystwyth, is one such place. Here, BT had begun to impose its dratted new Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) system, clearly without employing an ounce of imagination over its repercussions for this frequently storm-battered place, which has no mobile-phone signal and knows all about blackouts. Demonstrating almost unbelievable heartlessness, let alone arrogance, the new devices were given out with the warning: “You will not be able to call 999 (or any other numbers) from this phone if there is a cut in the electricity supply or if there are broadband problems.

  “So make sure you have another way of calling for help in an emergency.”

Feeble BBC Wales responds with mild-manned deference

FACED WITH escalating complaints by indignant customers, BT has temporarily paused the VOIP roll-out. But it may just as well admit the obvious: it’s out to trash the secure and dependable analogue network, and to replace it with a system inherently useless whenever there are power-cuts, or broadband disconnects for any other reason.

  It claims the copper lines used in conventional landlines will soon become too expensive to maintain. In the case of BT Group plc, this is a complete nonsense. In the last financial year, they reported a pre-tax profit of £2bn and, in the first six months of last year alone, the figure for Openreach was £1bn. The new phones are all about making even more money.

  The media and politicians need to kick up more of a racket about VOIP. BBC Wales, for example, is being puny. The corporation’s charter says its journalism “should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other…news providers.” But a recent online report on the Cwmystwyth fiasco contains zero analysis, and the somewhat forelock-tugging line: “BT emphasizes that we must move to a digital system and away from the old copper lines which are reaching the end of their life.” Nowhere does the BBC charter call for mild-mannered deference.

WALES CLIMATE change minister Julie James continues to try to slide out of a solemn commitment in 2021 to fund desperately urgent attempts to save Wales’s curlews from extinction within 10 years.

  She knows very well that the Cardiff government is under international obligations to protect this marvellous and characterful bird, with its distinctive downward-curving bill. Last November, she promised funding to back crucial work to halt its dire decline. 

  More than five months after we urged her to keep to her word, she continues to vacillate.

  Mick Green, the expert ornithologist and wildlife campaigner leading efforts to save Wales’s curlews, tells us: “We welcomed the minister’s words of support, but these must be translated into immediate action and funding on the ground. 

  “Extinction does not wait for civil service inertia. We have already lost one breeding season without funding since the launch of the recovery plan last November – we need decisions and action now. 

  “Natural Resources Wales is not fit for purpose. It should be run by ecologists, but instead we have bean-counters with no knowledge of how the natural world works. I pity my colleagues on the ground in NRW who are desperately trying to get things done despite the best efforts of management.

  “For NRW to propose tree planting on known curlew habitats is a travesty and probably unlawful. It is an example of its lack of joined up ecological thinking.”

THE spectacular merlin, Europe’s smallest falcon, is in trouble, along with 69 other birds on the British Trust for Ornithology’s red list of “birds of conservation concern”.

  From the 1950s, and for about 30 years afterwards, they were badly affected by organochlorine pesticides, with numbers having fallen by 1960 to an all-time low of about 550 pairs. It took till the early 1980s for the population to show signs of recovery. 

  Even now, according to the RSPB, merlins remain the UK’s most heavily-contaminated raptor, despite a big reduction in pesticide use over the last 35 years.

  So the suspected deaths of five merlin chicks high in a mid Wales valley this summer is particularly regrettable. It may may also be disquieting, because this small tragedy appears to have happened after a merlin nest was disturbed by people who had taken the decision to ring the chicks.

  In late spring 2022, a Ceredigion birdwatcher had spotted a female merlin disappearing beneath a clump of dead heather in a hollow at the head of a valley, and had wondered if it was the site of a nest. Returning in mid-June, he discovered that it was. Later, he and another birdwatcher and a licensed bird-ringer returned, and metal rings were clipped onto the chicks’ legs.

  Yet another birdwatcher visited the merlins’ cwm at the end of June and, after keeping watch for seven hours, concluded the nest had failed. It’s thought that disturbance at the nest during the ringing process could have been to blame.

  Vast numbers of birds – up to about a million – are ringed in Britain each year. As in other places, the practice is very popular in Wales, with people keen to get involved as a hobby or, as they see it, to help to gather information useful for conservation.

  But the activity is controversial. Birds are trapped in nets, measured, put in bags to be weighed, close-fitting identity tags secured to their legs. In the process, they may be injured or may die – ringers insist there are very few casualties in either category. It is claimed – with all seriousness – that the birds don’t mind. This is hogwash. No-one can possibly know how a bird subjected to such treatment feels about it; whether, or how, or how much, it suffers. If bird-ringers want to feel in the clear about what they do, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t necessarily expect such a claim to be taken seriously.

  I’m willing to believe that limited ringing may sometimes be justified on the ground that it provides baseline information about such things as habitat requirements, longevity, mortality rates and migration, especially perhaps as prerequisites for conservation-funding.

  However, the current scale of ringing looks certainly unjustified. Equally, ringing basically as a hobby, as a route to cuddly encounters with fascinating creatures, is entirely out of order. Fundamentally, birds have a clear right to be wild, to be utterly free, a right not to be caught in nets and perhaps, inadvertently, killed or injured, a right not have someone attach alien tags to their legs.

THIS COLUMN has for ages been calling for taxpayer-owned renewable energy-generation – probably principally wind-turbines. Allowing for set-up, maintenance and distribution costs, such a system could use local or regional grids to supply consumers with electricity free at the point of delivery.

  The idea is that renewable energy-provision could be regarded in the same way as a range of other taxpayer-funded public services, such as health, education and roads, which are all provided free at the point of delivery.

  Plans recently announced by the Welsh government to set up a new publicly-owned renewable energy company are a significant and very welcome step towards this goal. But the proposals need to be far more radical.

  Initially, the new company will focus on developing windfarms on publicly-owned woodland, and the scheme, very belatedly, will ensure that financial gains are not syphoned off abroad. Currently, the biggest windfarms in Wales are foreign-owned, often by overseas governments, including Sweden and France. 

  Certainly, the project is a UK first and will do its bit to tackle the climate crisis. But, addressing the Senedd, climate change minister Julie James was unexcitingly vague, suggesting little more than that energy profits could be used for home-insulation for people living near the new windfarms.

  The vision needs to be considerably widened. Will energy from our publicly-funded and publicly-owned windfarms simply be fed into the National Grid, with the power entering the general energy pot and fed back to Welsh households at the going price, which in the case of rural counties, such as Ceredigion, is consistently higher than elsewhere in Britain?

  What precisely will happen to the potentially huge earnings coming the way of the Welsh public purse? It’s a fair bet that the citizens of Wales would be more interested in electricity free at the point of delivery than in provision of home-insulation, important as that is.

  Let’s look seriously, too, at local and regional electricity grids. Why export Wales-generated renewable energy, only for it to be sent back, exclusively via the National Grid, volumes of electricity meanwhile being diminished through moving it about? 

  Ceredigion organic vegetable-growers used to look askance at the potty system insisted on by supermarkets which saw carrots grown here sent to East Anglia to be washed, before being lorried back to shops in west Wales. The growers rebelled, deserted the supermarkets and started selling direct to customers through local markets and shops. They never looked back. Let’s make it the same for home-grown electricity.

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.

A CALAMITY that played out in rural Scotland last winter could be repeated in other isolated parts of Britain – unless there is determined public and media vigilance and raucous protest to head off the threat.

  It was during an evening last November that an elderly man’s house caught fire half a mile from a remote Aberdeenshire village. Without near neighbours, and with little or no mobile phone signal, he needed a landline to call 999. 

  But stupidly, and dangerously, his telecoms company had not long before taken away that traditional lifeline.

  They had pulled the plug on his ever-dependable conventional phone and dumped him in a brave new world of digital gadgetry. Scandalously, the technology he was landed with turned out to be disastrously unfit for purpose.

  The fire broke out after a storm cut off the his electricity. Power-cuts don’t affect traditional landline telephones. They carry on as normal, so that if this pensioner hadn’t been caught up in the switch to digital he would have been able to phone for help.

  As it was, the blackout disabled the new-fangled device installed by the telecoms firm. They had given the man a wireless phone – known as Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP). These are totally tied in with the broadband internet network and, without electricity, that link is instantly severed.

  Unable to raise the alarm, the pensioner’s house burnt down.

  For the wilds of Scotland, we can read, for example, the innumerable remote homesteads of mid and north Wales, and take warning that they are included in an ill-considered plan by telecommunications companies to move all 29 million UK homes on to the VOIP by 2025. 

A RINGING EXAMPLE OF RAMPANT CAPITALISM

THUS, WITHIN a mere three years from now, firms including BT and Virgin propose to switch off the technology that currently powers landlines in the most remote parts of Wales, where mobile-phone signals can be weak, or non-existent, where neighbours may be far-flung and emergency services many miles dietant. The very places where a solid and reliable conventional phone is a lifeline in emergencies, as well as a comforting and dependable defence against social isolation, a non-fickle connection with the outside world.

  The Scottish pensioner’s tragic tale is just one repercussion, so far, of the telecoms industry’s blinkered rush to trash the secure and dependable analogue network, and to replace it with a system proven to be useless whenever there are power-cuts. Frequent blackouts are becoming increasingly likely because climate disruption is triggering more, and more severe, storms. Though power-failures can of course happen for a variety of other reasons, including, potentially, cyber-attacks. In any such eventuality, VOIP is a dead duck.

  Telecoms companies say the copper lines used by conventional phones will soon become too expensive to maintain. In the case of BT Group plc, the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK, 

a British multinational with operations in about 180 countries, you just want to say: “Oh, come on, pull the other leg…”

  Take Openreach, the BT subsidiary which maintains phone-cables and the rest of the paraphernalia that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the UK to the telephone and broadband networks. In the first six months of last year alone, Openreach reported pre-tax profit of…£1billion. 

  With surpluses of that order, it’s plainly ludicrous to put up maintenance costs as an excuse to scrap landlines. This is no more than a frenzied drive to generate ever more excessive gains. Despite a consequent loss of assured day-to-day telephone communication and – as the Scottish pensioner’s experience shows – a real risk to public safety and well-being. All in all, a ringing example of high-handed capitalism.

  Faced with escalating complaints by worried customers, BT has temporarily paused the VOIP roll-out, intending to restart it “once we’re more confident that the right products and solutions are in place that will provide more resilient connectivity. Probably later this year or early next.” 

  And how, practically, do you achieve such resilience faced with ever more furious Atlantic super-storms, which are rather adept at sweeping aside power-lines as if they were gossamer threads? Oh, no problem, BT consumer CEO Marc Allera tells us. His company will “work with energy providers on faster power restoration”. Oh yeah? So try telling that to those engineers who slave away in atrocious weather to fix downed electricity poles and lines but, despite herculean efforts, take sometimes days, even weeks, to complete the job. 

  And what of the real possibility thatcyber-hackers may take an interest in targeting civil infrastructure, including power supplies? BT is silent on that score.

  Ultimately, this pause in operations may be no more than an expression of hope that the laser of public displeasure will in time be switched off, and the money-making exercise will be quietly resumed.

  BT possesses the “solutions”? We would indeed be naive in the extreme to take that assurance on trust.

…

THE GREAT electricity price rip-off persists, ensuring that households all over Britain continue to receive bills hundreds of pounds higher than they should be based on the fuel mixes used in power-generation.

  Mid and north Wales are particularly badly affected. The regions’ many homes without mains gas, and which therefore use more electricity, are particularly badly affected. People in the south Wales area, which includes parts of Ceredigion and Powys, and the whole of Carmarthenshire, are almost as badly hit. 

  In April, I pointed out that a huge 40 per cent increase in the price of household electricity in mid and north Wales 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.

  The remaining 37 per cent or so is generated by gas power-stations. And here’s where we should be getting more than a little indignant. Because electricity bills are being artificially, and seriously, inflated as a result of a little-known, and increasingly illogical, wholesale market convention that allows gas – the most expensive fuel – to set the price for all generation.

  Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s emergency cash aid over soaring household energy bills will provide some temporary relief for the substantial number of households in rural Wales – about 21 per cent in Ceredigion alone – on such low incomes they are unable to keep homes adequately warm. 

  But determined political intervention is urgently needed to end this gas-is-king anomaly, which otherwise will continue to overshadow domestic electricity supply pricing.

  Rubbing salt in this particular wound is the fact that gas power-station owners have not only been excluded, so far, from Sunak’s 25 per cent energy windfall tax, but that they have been making mountainous gains. One of the biggest, SSE, has said its profits rose to £1.5 billion last year after its gas-fired plants cashed in on high prices.

  The fundamental point, however, is that the cockeyed industry practice that allows gas to set the price for all generation – highly ironically known as the ‘merit order’ – must be scrapped, especially now that the electricity system is powered predominantly not by gas but by renewables and nuclear. 

  This is something Ceredigion MP Ben Lake may like to get his teeth into. Already, he is pushing for a range of measures aimed at making energy more affordable for vulnerable people.

  In addition, he needs to be keenly aware of the pricing injustice wrapped up in Ofgem’s “energy” cap hike in April, which resulted in household electricity prices in rural Wales rising on average by a monumental 40 per cent. 

  If we hadn’t been clobbered by the ill-named ‘merit order’, the increase would instead have been about 14 per cent. For Ben’s constituents, that would have translated into savings of around £400 or £500 a year. Not to be sniffed at.

MINISTER FOR EXTINCTION

WALES’s climate change minister Julie James continues to try to slide out of a solemn commitment last year to fund desperately urgent attempts to save Wales’s curlews from extinction within 10 years.

  She knows very well that the Welsh government is under international obligations to protect this marvellous and characterful bird, with its distinctive downward-curving bill. Last November, she promised funding to back crucial work to halt its dire decline. 

  Five weeks after this column urged her to keep to her word, she continues to vacillate.

  Mick Green, the expert ornithologist and wildlife campaigner leading efforts to save Wales’s curlews, tells me: “We welcomed the minister’s words of support, but these must be translated into immediate action and funding on the ground. 

  “Extinction does not wait for civil service inertia. We have already lost one breeding season without funding since the launch of the recovery plan last November – we need decisions and action now. 

  “Natural Resources Wales is not fit for purpose. It should be run by ecologists, but instead we have bean-counters with no knowledge of how the natural world works. I pity my colleagues on the ground in NRW who are desperately trying to get things done despite the best efforts of management.

  “For NRW to propose tree planting on known curlew habitats is a travesty and probably unlawful. It is an example of its lack of joined up ecological thinking.”

THIS SPRING’S swingeing energy price rises will see households in Ceredigion, one of the poorest places in Europe, asked to fork out a potentially crippling £863 extra a year, well above the UK average rise of £598.

  As energy regulator Ofgem raises the price cap, the county will be the worst hit in Wales and second hardest throughout the UK. Gwynedd, Powys and Carmarthenshire will be in the UK top six for biggest expected rises, at fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.

  But relax; this distinction comes with a huge and satisfying compensation. For you have to remember that. every time you turn on a light or boil an egg, you will be contributing handsomely, albeit without any choice, to that most deserving of charities – The Distressed Moneybags Aid Association (DMAA). 

  It’s this wonderfully benevolent organisation that, through your generosity as energy consumers, distributes the green levies that do in fact rather weigh down your household energy bills.

  Beneficiaries include overseas-based energy companies with windfarms in Wales, wealthy landowners, pension funds and rich individuals.

  Examples include Falck Renewables, a Danish conglomerate offshoot, which has done very nicely out of green consumer-financed subsidies since its 39-turbine windfarm at Cefn Croes in north Ceredigion opened in 2005. Unless things now change, the poorest rural Wales households will also find themselves helping – through the ‘environmental and social costs’ (the green levies) element of their bills – to finance Swedish company Vattenfall, which has recently opened Wales’s biggest onshore windfarm at Pen y Cymoedd in south Wales. In this case, the struggling of Ceredigion will be putting their hands in their pockets to help out a multinational power company owned by…the Swedish state.

  And, as we peruse the long list of those given that little bit extra by the DMAA, don’t let’s forget ex-prime minister David Cameron, who put up a wind-turbine in his back garden in the Cotswolds – and duly got his whack.

  For the poorest of rural Wales and elsewhere, this can’t go on. With the least delay, a way must be found to exempt from green charges those already struggling to pay for non-negotiable essentials – like food for their children, like adequate heating for their homes.

  Between about 29 and 41 per cent of our electricity and gas bills pays for the energy itself. The rest covers the cost of delivering it to consumers (between about 24 and 29pc), operating costs of the energy company (roughly, between 20 and 26pc), VAT at five pc and…the ‘green’ levies. These are between 25.5 and 27pc for electricity, and two per cent for gas, and it is these that the financially stressed must now be relieved of. 

  The picture for everyone is bad enough. According to Ofgem, the energy regulator, households are currently paying an average of £1,277 for their gas and electricity, with that figure set to rise to about £2,000 from this April as increases in wholesale gas and electricity prices feed through into domestic bills and the price cap is raised.

  Of this, 15.3 per cent — £195 a year before this spring’s increase — goes on subsidies. On electricity bills alone, the‘environmental and social costs’ element can be as high as 27 per cent. This last is especially a burden in rural Wales, where many homes are off-grid for gas, being fundamentally all-electric, supplemented by wood-power and bottled gas. 

  The environmental levies cover a perplexing number of schemes, some of which are simply money-making devices for landowners, companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals.

  There is the Renewables Obligation (RO), under which consumers subsidise renewable energy at a cost of £6.3 billion a year, paid by both domestic consumers and business users of electricity. Sometimes, this scheme fails spectacularly, and at a particular cost to hard-up households. In 2020, for instance, wind and solar farms generated so much electricity on windy and sunny days that they had to be paid £282 million in ‘constraint payments’ to turn off their supplies.

  The bill again falls on consumers – our rural poor must once more be of prime concern – under a newish green initiative, Contracts for Difference, which offers a guaranteed price for electricity generated. At the most recent auction for applicants last September, the UK government offered £265 million of subsidies. Good news for landowners and renewables developers, another downer for Ceredigion householders eking out an existence on the minimum wage and trips to food-banks.

  Since the early 1990s, companies with windfarms in Wales have made billions from the sale of electricity, massively enhanced by the subsidies paid by ordinary households, with the only, and very slight, longer-term advantage for local communities having been rather patronising ‘community fund’ sweeteners of a few hundred thousands. At the same time, landowners in Wales have not been slow to cash in on this bonanza.

  All are eager beneficiaries of the Distressed Moneybags’ Aid Association, to which many of us may wish to no longer, caps doffed, so obediently contribute.

  Since the early 1990s, companies with windfarms in Wales have made billions from the sale of electricity, massively enhanced by the subsidies paid by ordinary households, with the only, and very slight, longer-term advantage for local communities having been rather patronising ‘community fund’ sweeteners of a few hundred thousands. At the same time, landowners in Wales have not been slow to cash in on this bonanza.

  All are eager beneficiaries of the DMAA, to which many of us may wish to no longer, caps doffed, so obediently contribute.

10 February 2022

SO WHOLESALE gas prices are rocketing and we’re alerted to probable soaring gas and electricity bills after a likely doubling of the energy price-cap in April.

  How to react? Send an emotionally controlled note to Vladimir Putin asking if he’d mind terribly lowering the price of Russian gas? Try to master the art of drinking early morning coffee in your sub-zero kitchen while encumbered by unyielding sheepskin mittens?

  Best instead to see this as a moment of liberation. A time, long overdue, to break free from the tedium of being sucked into the slipstream of a chaotic energy market ruled by volatile demand and unstable supply.

  The clue, to start with, is to recognise that being dependent on electricity and gas from sources beyond our control or influence is outdated and risky. We know that renewables – free wind, free water, free sun, energy beyond the human factor – can provide all the power we need, and that this is markedly the case in rural Wales. We know it, we’re just being mighty slow to make it come true.

  All right, there has been a considerable commercial cashing in on wind-power; some people have got solar or photovoltaic panels, yielding partial independence from energy conglomerates. And some community groups have gone to enormous organisational lengths to get their own turbine. 

  But all this is a long way short of the ideal, and the achievable. 

  Quite simply, energy-provision must be added to the list of all the other free-at-the-point-of-need public services we take for granted.

  The NHS, fire, rescue, police and ambulance services, schools, roads, public libraries, refuse-collections, coastguards… All are paid for through taxes of one sort or another. And, crucially, all are free at the point of delivery.

  Energy-provision should be exactly the same.

  It takes just a single piece of local government history to illustrate precisely how people have for far too long been missing out on energy free at the point of use.

  In 2006, the Cambrian News discovered that Ceredigion council had been secretly negotiating a £1m land deal so that it could build prestigious new council offices next to a recently announced Welsh Assembly Government headquarters at Parcyllyn on the outskirts of Aberystwyth.

  The public had been told nothing about a land deal or about new offices. It hadn’t been consulted. Yet this grand new edifice was going to cost the taxpayer £18m. The Cambrian News objected repeatedly to what it saw as irresponsible spending. Council staff, it argued, occupied perfectly civilised offices around Aberystwyth and were important to town centre businesses. Eventually, the authority pulled back and adopted a design about £3m cheaper. But it was a pale victory for taxpayers and for press campaigning.

  A major opportunity had been missed. If, rather than lashing out on what was basically a vanity project, the council had instead ploughed those millions into a taxpayer-owned windfarm of, say, 20 two-megawatt turbines, the average annual electricity needs of 20,000 homes, about two-thirds of the Ceredigion total, would have been met. If technology allowed, power could have been fed directly into those homes; otherwise, it could have been sold by the council to the local grid, with individual households then receiving cash payments for the energy these publicly-owned turbines had generated.

  The development would have reduced Ceredigion’s carbon-footprint by about 50,000 tonnes a year (600,000 over the 12 years since the council’s Parcyllyn offices were completed), and proclaimed active support for a  sustainable energy future for the county.

  It would have been a historic and radical departure, establishing, for the first time, energy-provision as a public service like any other. 

  Alternatively, individual or smaller numbers of turbines supplying homes directly could have been funded and maintained – and of course still could be now, 12 years later – by public money from a variety of sources. The new co-operation agreement between Labour and Plaid Cymru, which talks of “community-owned” renewables-generation, could encompass such an arrangement, provided it was financed through public, not private, money.

  Wind-turbines don’t occupy much land, so  Ceredigion council should now make up for lost time by setting them up on, for example, one or more of its publicly-owned ‘county farms’,  striking a belated blow for household power free at the point of use, and for energy independence. Powys, meanwhile, with a farms estate of 138 holdings across 10,700 acres, should act similarly.

  Another valuable initiative would be Welsh government financing of photovoltaic panels for, progressively, every home in Wales. As well as helping to establish the free-at-the-point-of-use principle, this would be an enlightened move in terms of energy self-sufficiency, climate-change amelioration and job-creation, and would support the NHS by helping to keep warm and well people currently caught in the fuel-poverty trap.

21 December 2021

IT HAS been like trying to get blood from a stone, but bit by tortuous bit the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started.

  That it has been such a gargantuan struggle is largely down to governments, politicians and large chunks of the media deciding to resolutely look the other way, rather than act to establish Covid-19’s origins to help guard against future disasters. The consequence is a clear and present danger of the whole thing happening again. 

  This horror story has seen more than 5.4 million people worldwide die. In Wales, the virus has been implicated in the deaths of more than 6,700, with about 600,000 cases of one or other variant recorded. The resulting grief, stress and mental harm, never mind the economic damage, is incalculable.

  Maddeningly, however, attempts to achieve clarity about the roots of the pandemic are being dangerously delayed by the concealing of fact and by official cover-up. The result has been a virtual complete absence of public debate on the issue.

  When, for instance, did you last hear the subject aired on BBC news? Yes, exactly… Almost as if, oh dear, this is all rather a sensitive matter with which the government thinks the public need not be troubled, so we’re quite capable of taking a hint.

  In the context of this cosy conspiracy of silence, Whitehall’s recent refusal to release details of key email conversations between leading scientists over Covid-19’s origins stands out. Yet this was political dynamite.

  Towards the end of last year, The Mail on Sunday used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a cache of 32 emails about a secretive teleconference between British and American scientists held early in the pandemic.

  That call is at the centre of concerns that the scientific establishment tried to stifle debate on the pandemic’s beginnings, as damning new evidence emerges of US funding ties to high-risk research on bat viruses in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first Covid cases emerged in late 2019.

  The paper requested emails on the call between, among others, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, and its organisers, Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Anthony Fauci, a US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser. Shockingly, when the documents were released, page after page had been blacked out by Whitehall officials. More recently, detail from the emails provided by members of the US Congress revealed that top British and US scientists agreed to label as ‘conspiracy theory’ any suggestions that Covid-19 might be linked to a laboratory incident in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Yet it emerged that these same experts in fact privately feared the new virus showed signs of lab manipulation. In public, however, they comprehensively rubbished any such suggestion.

  I asked the BBC’s outgoing head of news, Fran Unsworth, why they hadn’t touched the story. She didn’t reply.

  The Welsh government tells us its public health response to the pandemic consists of imposing restrictions that prevent or slow the spread of coronavirus, and overseeing the Welsh NHS. That such action is far too limited is shown by evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, which heard that a laboratory leak is now the more likely origin of Covid since, despite two years of searching, an animal host to support the theory of a viral transfer between wildlife and people has never been found. Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, added that it was reasonable to conclude that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.

  Chillingly, she added: “Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But there is so much stored information that it will eventually come out.”

  The Welsh government should now urgently galvanise debate and challenge obfuscation surrounding Covid’s origins. Specifically, it should condemn the UK government’s blocking of public access to the crucial collection of emails so disgracefully redacted.

  Mark Drakeford is now a household name in a way that no other Wales first minister before him has been. He is therefore well placed to add to a Welsh government initiative by focusing attention on Peter Daszak, a British scientist and graduate of Bangor University, whose New York organisation funnelled US funds to research partners at Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of the Covid conundrum. It was here that, in the five years to 2020, a multinational group of 15 scientists, backed by $600,000 of US public funds, spliced together two different coronaviruses, creating a more dangerous version, which they found had the potential to infect people, according to the journal Nature.

  Drakeford may judge, like ex-US president Barack Obama, that such experimentation is simply unacceptably risky. If he does, he should say so – very emphatically.