Want to understand why those energy prices really keep rising?

It’s been documented and explained for years by Richard North and Christopher Booker.  But those who have not seen their many warnings about what was in store for us as a result of policies, that so many people cheered for being ‘green’, might benefit from this very quick summary that Booker puts in his column today.

Two weeks ago, in a column headed “It’s showdown time for our insane green energy policies”, I observed that this is the moment when the roof is finally starting to fall in on a collective flight from reality that I have been reporting here for years.

But what few people yet realise is how far this catastrophic mess we are in was not only predictable, but has also been quite deliberately brought about, through the Government’s own policies.

Their central aim, though never openly explained, has been twofold. One leg has been to build, by 2020, some 30,000 wind turbines, so ludicrously expensive that we must pay double or treble the market rate for the power they so inefficiently produce.

The other leg is that, to make this seem competitive, we should also eventually be made to pay twice the going rate for all other forms of electricity: hence the “carbon tax” on coal and gas, and the colossal price we are to pay for power from Hinkley Point and other new nuclear power stations (four times the cost of nuclear, estimated by a Royal Academy of Engineering study only nine years ago).

That is why our energy companies pathetically try to explain that a third of the increased costs driving their latest price rises are made inevitable by the various levies we must pay directly for those “green” policies, such as the hidden subsidies being showered on the owners of our ever-growing number of wind farms and acres of solar panels.

Another third represents what we must pay for the thousands of miles of cabling needed to connect those “renewables” to the grid (which Ofgem estimated might, by 2020, cost us another £40 billion).

Then there are the other measures needed to counteract the unbalancing of the grid by the intermittency of “renewables”, such as hiring those thousands of diesel generators to provide back-up, which makes a further mockery of the “de-carbonisation” policy mandated by the Climate Change Act that Mr Cameron was so keen on.

The truth is that we are being brought face to face with the utter absurdity of everything this Government’s bizarre ragbag of policies has been trying to achieve.

For Mr Cameron to blame all this on Mr Miliband only shows that the fuses in his brain have at last begun to blow. By mindlessly going along with all this nonsense, it is our entire political class that has created this shambles. It is the rest of us, alas, who must now live with the consequences.

Given all this, does anyone believe a word these pompous hypocrites have to say, and does anyone believe the laughably and ridiculously low amount DECC claims we pay to support this insanity?  Little over £100 per year on energy bills doesn’t come close to covering the cost to energy consumers and taxpayers of all these politically mandated measures.

You might be asking yourself why the political class has done all this.  The answer to that is simple.  ‘Sustainability’.  But it’s essential to understand that the notion of sustainability has been corrupted.  Instead it encompassing the development of low impact sustainable ways of providing sufficient energy, water, shelter and other basic human needs to meet the demands of a growing population – which technology can achieve – it has been twisted into meaning that people must use less of everything.  How can they be sure people will use less?  By restricting supply (e.g. unreliable turbines instead of reliable coal and gas, no new reservoirs combined with water metering) and driving up prices to a level that many people cannot afford.  Simple, and vicious.   But then, these are the very people who continually argue that the world population needs to be reduced because they consider humans to be a virus that is destroying the planet.  But the politicians believed (and some still believe) that aligning with these people mark them as responsible and virtuous, therefore more electorally appealing.

In light of the anger these supply and price measures are provoking and the slowly growing awareness of just what lays behind these measures, I think back to those ‘enlightened’ environmentally aware people who queued up to ridicule North and Booker for their projections of the effects the policies would have.  One wonders where these previously vocal people are now, as the chickens are starting to come home to roost.

The pips are already squeaking and we are not even close to the full impact of this political insanity.  This issue is one that will keep coming back to the fore as the prices continue to be ramped up.  The politicians have created a mess they have no solution to.  Time to get the popcorn, while making sure you do what you must to stay warm this winter…

Guilty

Each time a provider has put up their prices, Labour has spun its smoke and mirrors on their ludicrous plan for a 20 month price freeze.  Meanwhile the Tories have said people need to change provider to get a cheaper deal.

Both are trying to convince the public they want to ‘do something’ even though both have laid the blame for the huge and continuing price rises at the door of the energy providers and have tried to ignore the government’s significant role in driving up energy costs – which are far greater than the 10% admitted to by DECC.

But today, against a backdrop of Tories and Socialists at least going through the motions of claiming they want to see the rapidly increasing burden of energy prices reduced, the Lib Dem energy minister, Ed Davey, has said he is pledging to turn the screw even harder.

I am not going to give up on renewable energy, they are not going to touch it, and I am not going to betray the fuel poor. That’s for me is a complete red line. I feel passionate about that.

The green taxes we have been pushing as Liberal Democrats in this government have been extraordinarily successful and point to an extremely green, clean energy future. They’re not being touched and they won’t be touched. It’s incredibly important for investors that they hear that.

His pledge to help the fuel poor just creates more fuel poor to pay for it.  But his real priority is renewables.  He wants to carpet bomb the country with wind turbines so he can rid the energy mix of coal fired energy – at a time when environmentalist Germany is building more competitive and reliable coal fired plants, to ensure its people and industry can afford to power homes and businesses.

While Germany thinks about its power needs and acts on them, Britain has the insipid Davey thinking about investors’ needs and crippling consumers.  These investors are the people and companies that coin in a fortune from our taxes and energy levies to put up wind turbines that earn them vast sums, even when the turbines deliver only around a 1/5th of their energy capacity – and they even make money when the turbines generate nothing!  It is ideology-driven insanity.

The sustainability agenda has a new figurehead in the UK.  Ed Davey, a man who is guilty of dogged determination to make things worse because he refuses to accept his direction is damaging.

He thinks he is a force for good.  He is merely a puppet of delusional environmentalists, with little concept of the real world and is in thrall to those who believe humans are a plague that should be controlled, by reversing industrial progress and undoing the humanitarian progress that has enabled many people of even meagre means to heat the property they live in.

Ed Davey is possibly the most dangerous extremist in this country today.  The damage he is capable of wreaking far exceeds that of armed terrorists.  His sustainability jihad should be of serious concern to everyone who does not have a parasitic interest in making money from underperforming novelties that attract ludicrously inflated feed in tariffs: and whose low output must be purchased by energy providers irrespective of the cost – the pain of which is then borne by all powerless energy consumers.

Davey is out of control and impervious to the wishes of the people.  He is aided in this by the fact we do not have democratic control that enables this idiot to be called to account.  More than any other politician today, he embodies the pressing need for structural reform of governance in this country to ensure people have the power, not dictatorial ideologues elected by around 28,000 voters in one corner of south west London.

The cheapest unit of energy is always the one that isn’t used

It may be a cliche, but it’s true.  The cheapest unit of energy is always the one that isn’t used.

Those are the words of RWE npower’s Chief Executive, Paul Massara (on the video below).

Once again we see reinforced and overtly articulated, the implementation of the global sustainability agenda, which is seeking to force consumers to use less energy by driving up prices.  It is staring us in the face, yet still it is shrouded in deception and dishonesty – even with the price comparison sites pretending better deals can be had, so they cash in each time some desperate customer switches supplier to postpone the inevitable hike of more than 10% when their ‘fix’ deal ends.

All the comments from David Cameron, Michael Fallon and the cast of bare faced liars at the heart of government, including Ed ‘justify your price increase as I load on the levies’ Davey, about shopping around for a better deal, is nothing more than theatre.  It’s all an act.  There is no plan, no impetus and no desire to increase energy supply to meet demand.  The politicians know the agenda they are working to.  They know they are pricing people out of the ability to afford energy to heat their homes and cook their food, all for the corrupted ideal of environmentalism.

Only the most deceitful or utterly incompetent and deluded fool could possibly argue that almost doubling the wholesale cost of electricity from nuclear power, in 10 years time, could result in cheaper energy bills.  But that was David Cameron, speaking about the plans for the construction of Hinkley Point C.  Only a moron like him could suggest that getting a French company to build the power station with oodles of Chinese money equates to kick starting the UK’s nuclear industry.

It is an outrageous lie.

If all this does not provide sufficient evidence that our rulers – who are supposed to be our servants – are serving interests other than ours, then nothing will.

More media stupidity on energy

With very few notable exceptions, it seems the British media is stuffed with hacks who exhibit no evidence of an enquiring mind, no willingness to question and test the stories they are being fed and no interest in publishing challenging pieces that readers need to be told, no matter how difficult the conclusion is for people to accept.

The Mail on Sunday has one of its increasingly half baked, cor blimey editorials today where is proclaims ‘We must sort out fuel prices… right now’.  It doesn’t perform any real service to its readers because it doesn’t recognise and set out the real problems about energy prices.

At the most simplistic level, prices are rising for four reasons:

1. Increasing energy prices on the wholesale market are being passed on to customers by the regulated providers
2. Increasing government-imposed ‘green levies’ imposed to pay subsidies and grossly inflated tariffs to corporates and land owners for building and hosting inefficient and expensive wind turbines that are incapable of replacing the conventional energy generating capacity
3. Additional government-imposed levies designed to drive up the cost of energy in order to leave many people with no choice but to use less energy than they do now, regardless of how cold it may get in the winter
4. The regulated providers seeking to maintain a margin, which in the retail market is only around 5% profit, as reward for the good they provide

But you would never understand this from reading the Mail piece.  Instead it adopts the economically illiterate position of the Archbishop of Canterbury – a man with a commercial background who should know better – which effectively calls for the energy providers to absorb the rising cost of energy themselves and provide it to people at cost, or even at a loss.  The Mail barely touches on the significant impact of government policy.

Where is its 4 page spread examining the policy of using pricing as a means for forcing reduced energy use?  Where is its editorial attacking the imposition of vast levies to install turbines at a cost of billions of pounds, which generate on an average less than 25% of their stated capacity – and where the guaranteed price for what little energy they produce offshore will be £155 per megawatt hour (MWh) and onshore is £110/MWh – falling to a still eye watering £135/MWh and £95/MWh respectively in a couple of years?  That compares to a current guaranteed price for nuclear power of £48/MWh.  Even that price is expected to almost double to around £90/MWh for new nuclear build as the government fritters away our money as it desperately tries to make up for outrageous strategic failure on new energy build over the last three decades.

What the Mail also fails to grasp, let alone report, is the disturbing fact that the structure of energy prices and what they are made up of is now so complex, not even the most savvy analyst can break down where the money we pay actually goes to.

There are so many impositions and elements in energy today that working out who the money is going to is virtually impossible.  Which could explain why we see Scottish and Southern Energy declaring that the cost of energy has gone up 4% in the last year, while British Gas say it is 13% in the last year.  The only way to achieve transparency in energy pricing is to start again from scratch and identify exactly what goes where.  Then we could have some confidence in British Gas’ breakdown, shown below:

What is clear is that while there are pressures from government and consumers on energy companies to rein in their costs, no one seems to be connecting the dots about how government and regulation is driving up the wholesale costs to energy companies, how transmission charges are rising unchecked and how direct levies and taxes by government are also not subject to proper scrutiny or downward pressure.

Until a lot of light is cast on this and the government is called to account for its part in this – and forced to explain to people the global and EU dimensions to the vicious policy of forcing down demand through higher prices in the name of ‘sustainability’ – the cost of energy is going to continue to rise.

The lightweight intervention of Dr Justin Welby and the weak arsed commentary of the Mail achieves nothing and helps no one.

Energy prices, energy gaps and ignoring the elephant in the room

The appearance of Paul Massara, chief executive of RWE npower, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning signalled a continuation of the slow burn of superficial media coverage about the issues of energy prices and energy gaps.

Massara was there to explain his argument that government policy is the major factor behind rising energy costs.  It is hard to disagree with when one considers the imposition of levies and charges that are being tacked on to the cost of gas and electricity.  But Massara certainly isn’t telling the whole story and is deftly attempting to play down the ways in which the energy companies – and other investors highlighted in recent stories about the Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR) scandal – are cashing in at consumer expense.

However, nothing the government or the energy companies are saying is acknowledging the elephant in the room.

For at the heart of all these measures, charges, initiatives and regulations that consumers are being hit with is one simple fact – the aim of the government is to drive up prices to reduce demand.  In other words, the policy is to force people to use less energy, rather than governments seeking to provide enough energy to meet the demand of a growing population.

The cart is being put before the horse in this way to satisfy a wrongheaded and retrograde direction of travel, one that seeks to reverse decades of human progress while describing this plan, in classic doublespeak, as progress.

Behind this is the nefarious ‘sustainability agenda’, which dictates that the ever growing number of people must get by with less, and to ensure they do consume less governments will impose measures to limit supply and force prices up.

The very notion of encouraging innovation to find cleaner, more affordable and more efficient ways of meeting the growing global demand for energy, is heresy.  It must not be discussed, for no one must be given the impression there is an alternative to the vicious agenda being followed by the global political elite and the corporates that stand to make a fortune for delivering less to their customers.

While the media, government ministers, assorted talking heads and the lavishly remunerated cartel of CEOs from the big six energy firms continue to postulate, comment, argue and prattle their various offerings about our energy future, the root cause of all this remains a globally determined diktat that has never been put to the people in consultation or presented to them for their approval – yet for which the people are expected to pay vast amounts more in return for very much less.

This is the huge elephant in the room from which they are averting their eyes, in case the rest of us notice what is happening and take a stand against the political and corporatist class.

Establishment on the attack – it’s not about saving the climate, it’s about profitable domination of the people

So another week has passed with yet more plans unveiled for progressing the insipid ‘sustainability’ agenda, based upon the anti democratic implementation of Agenda 21, which is used as cover for something altogether more sinister.  There is no other way to put this.  The UK is at war.  What is at stake is our liberty, our privacy and personal freedoms, in fact our very way of life.

If you’re saying to yourself that this is overblown, hyperbolic, conspiratorial nonsense then pause and take some time to think in depth about why we are seeing the events that are currently unfolding, quietly and virtually unnoticed, in the UK today – a UK that is a modern, industrialised society.

Think about the impact on this country’s increasing population, that shows no sign of slowing its growth, of the political decisions that have been taken to prevent the construction of reservoirs that would increase our water capacity, the purpose of which is to force our growing number to use less water than is currently used by the smaller number of us today.

Think about the impact on this country’s increasing population, that shows no sign of slowing its growth, of plans being hatched right now, the purpose of which is to force the larger population in the future to use 27% less energy than is currently used by the smaller number of us today.

Think about the impact on this country’s increasing population, that shows no sign of slowing its growth, of regulations put in place the purpose of which is to prevent the larger population in the future disposing of waste efficiently, by reducing landfill capacity and so far quadrupling the amount we are charged for getting rid of our refuse.

These are just three examples of the assault on the British people by conducting a controlled reduction in the capacity and provision of the essentials for life itself, essentials for the way of life that has developed and sustains us, and essentials for effective sanitation to maintain a healthy life.  And in each of these examples not only is capacity and provision being reduced dramatically per capita, but the corporate monopolies that have been granted control over these essentials are being permitted and/or compelled to drive up the charges for them – not only stripping away from us more of our disposable income and securing huge profits for themselves, but also reversing decades of effort and action to ensure the poorest and most vulnerable in our society have affordable provision.

One would typically expect a tipping point to be reached where the population draws a line and challenges the establishment that, rather than implementing common sense and affordable solutions to maintain standards and quality of living, is instead so committed to adversely affecting people’s lives.

With that in mind, now think about why government seizes every opportunity to control and restrict the right of people to assemble in protest, monitor who communicates with whom, carpets our towns and cities with CCTV cameras that have ever increasing capability, seeks to harvest our DNA and centralise our health records, furthers the proliferation of court hearings held in secret and imposes harsher sentences on people who reveal the details of secret cases than on those who commit violent offences.  Could it be anything to do with keeping the people in check, so protest against the damaging and oppressive actions can be prevented and the agenda can be pursued to the advantage and benefit of the elite few?

There is more besides, but these examples illustrate the point clearly enough.  At the end of the line of the erosion of our liberties and privacy is the establishment’s desire to control and dominate the people, treating all of us as suspects to be monitored and controlled and trotting out the cant that if we’ve nothing to hide we’ve nothing to fear – and of course there is the corporates’ desire to cash in by providing the ‘solutions’ at our expense.