The Big Six aren’t to blame for high energy prices
Have Britain’s main suppliers of energy abused their monopoly position?
UK energy secretary Ed Davey is in the news again. He has written to the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) and the Competition and Markets Authority, asking them to add a new question to a review they are conducting into Britain’s energy markets. He suggested that they look closely at whether Britain’s main supplier of energy, British Gas, has abused its monopoly position in order to make profits at the rate of 11 per cent. Through this move, Davey has piled extra pressure on unelected officials to find Britain’s ‘Big Six’ energy firms guilty of high prices, and the government entirely innocent of any failure to maintain a decent infrastructure for central heating and electricity.
Everyone hates the Big Six. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband announced back in September that he would, if elected, freeze energy prices for 20 months. Now the government has tried to strike a similarly populist note. Recent floods have overwhelmed Britain’s drainage infrastructure, and the power cuts that have followed in their wake underline the inadequate capacity that the country suffers in the realm of electricity. Now, with temperatures dropping in February and the typical annual bill for household gas running up to £850, politicians are rushing to appear friendly to the needs of voters and consumers.
Davey’s manoeuvre is completely transparent in its cynicism. The structure of the energy market in Britain is no secret, and nor is the dominance of British Gas within it. Liberal Democrat Davey, like many in his party, holds to the utterly superficial view that energy suppliers are ripping off the consumer and laughing all the way to the bank. This outlook only obscures what is really inflating energy prices: the crippling lack of innovation in British energy.
What now counts for innovation in residential energy are costly green initiatives aimed purely at stirring a sense of guilt among British consumers for their carbon footprint. These include the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s £11.7 billion ‘smart meter’ programme, whose stated benefits seem to have been conjured from thin air. Meanwhile, innovation on the supply side of UK gas and electricity is now so weak that the country’s stored gas and electric power stations are sorrowfully inadequate.
Furthermore, the National Audit Office has argued that Britain’s weak infrastructure only serves to inflate prices further. In November the NAO reported that the government ‘has made no assessment of the overall impact of infrastructure on future bills or whether those bills will be affordable’. Yet, instead of paying attention to this uncharacteristic burst of insight from a quango, MPs chose to jostle with each other to throw mud at the Big Six.
It says a lot about the lack of forward planning in this country that it is actually a newly formed investor group, Atlantic Supergrid, that may turn out to do something more useful than Whitehall: over a £4 billion, 1000-mile cable, it hopes to pipe geothermal and hydroelectric power from Iceland to three million UK homes. Britain is having to import more electricity than ever before, but this Icelandic prospect could represent an innovative diversification of energy supply. In the meantime, though, it looks like we will have to put up with yet more hot air from Britain’s exhausted energy windbags.
Good luck to the #farmers on their march today!
I probably don't need to tell you to wrap up warm. But please remember that no part of the UK's green agenda is your friend. All of it is intended to deprive you of your livelihood, one way or another. That is its design.
Brilliant piece by @danielbenami. RECOMMENDED
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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