According to a recent pre budget briefing the government is looking at options to lower energy prices . They have apparently got there from polling showing people are alarmed by rising inflation. Dear energy is squeezing real incomes.
Well done for getting there, though it is surprising it has taken so long and needed polls. What has been obvious for a long time is the damage Mr Miliband’s supercharged version of net zero transition is making for uncompetitive industry floundering on very dear energy, carbon taxes and emissions controls. Mr Miliband may be pleased to see the string of closures of refineries, oil and gas production, petro chemical, steel, ceramics and the rest. These are destroying good jobs, undermining national security, paying taxes to foreign countries and making us depend on imports. This dear energy policy must be changed.
We read they are looking at scrapping VAT on home energy bills. That would be welcome, if paid for with one of the cuts in public spending I have often listed. It is not however tackling the root causes of our dear energy and not providing relief to factories on the edge of closure.
Locking ourselves into very expensive renewable power by providing a guaranteed price for many years well above competitor country energy prices needs to stop. The costs of having gas fired back up needs to be factored into the sums on renewable energy.
The bidding system for electricity capacity and for electricity take off from current generating plant needs to be based on going for the cheapest.When commissioning capacity the cost of back up power to meet a contractual commitment with interruptible renewables needs to be part of the bid.We need an end to emissions trading, carbon taxes and the forthcoming carbon tariff.
September 15, 2025
JD Vance negotiated a deal to install more nuclear power generation for tech powering. This is what Reeves will be saying is her success story but actually he carbon tax and net zero is wiping out the economy.
September 15, 2025
…… AND:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15098357/Transport-union-mocks-commuters-strike-London-Underground-Majorca.html
Time to get driverless trains onto our rail network.
September 15, 2025
A much boasted claim by Milibrain is about the jobs created by decarbonisation. I think it was a Spanish research found for every green job six traditional jobs were lost and most green jobs are in compliance. So absolutely no value added.
It is impossible to decarbonise electricity supply unless at least 40gw of nuclear is built. As this will take years to achieve we can expect some very cold, dark winters.
September 15, 2025
Agree – Every government, local government, qango and other funded bodies i.e NHS, Uniersities etc, all have division, departmental and team ‘net-zero’ managers and administrators …..thats the green employment growth
September 15, 2025
The more jobs there are in simply producing energy the poorer we all become. I expect the next bright idea will be the creation of millions of green jobs when Net Zero bans agricultural machinery and fertilisers.
September 15, 2025
Agree with everything you propose.
Let us have a free bidding process for base load generation with no subsidies, taxes including North Sea windfall taxes.
My biggest fear is that we have gone past the point of no return for the firms like INEOS, Astra Zeneca and others. Investment plans will be implemented on the assumption of another 42 months of Milliband and his zealots.
September 15, 2025
People have been complaining about our energy policies for more than a decade yet government ignored them preferring to plough on anyway forcing ever higher bills on industry and households. Miliband, no doubt with Starmer’s agreement, has made a bad situation a whole lot worse. Kathryn Porter, an energy expert, wrote an excellent piece in yesterday’s Telegraph pointing out the fallacy and cost of reliance on wind and solar. This article should be mandatory reading for everyone. Miliband is taking our Country towards an energy catastrophe with ever rising costs and increasing and dangerous intermittency. He has to be stopped.
September 15, 2025
Yes, “…scrapping VAT on home energy bills. That would be welcome…” – although not nearly as welcome nor helpful as it would have been had it been done when you first proposed it as a budget measure a good few years ago.
September 15, 2025
What about scrapping the 20% VAT rate on non-VAT registered small businesses.
September 15, 2025
Cynical deflection, Labours PR machine is hitting the Media. Britain and America to build new generation of nuclear plants in ‘golden age’ deal. Landmark partnership will help UK avoid blackouts under Labour’s net zero drive
Comments from others “Absolute madness. If you build enough nuclear power to “prevent blackouts “you don’t need the windmills. This way the poor electricity user pays twice. Total unadulterated madness.”
September 15, 2025
Sir John,
At a time when government wants to push more and more on line, it seems folly to deliberately reduce the supply of energy whilst at the same time, making what energy we do have, too expensive for people and competitive businesses to access it.
I heard yesterday that they are looking at making crematorium comply to net zero with additional costs of £50000 per facility. We are rapidly reaching the stage where we cannot afford to live nor afford to die.
September 15, 2025
You can’t have cheaper energy and net-zero ….its just economically & physically impossible
September 15, 2025
‘ looking at options to lower energy prices .’ is only a sop to indicate the government is aware it is an issue.
Starmer and co have a lot to worry about at the moment.
September 15, 2025
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard P. Feynman
Same for a successful Economy.
A mad lefty professor of Economics from the UWE on GBnews (I think it was) the other day talking complete drivel about tax levels and the Laffer Curve. What hope have the students got?
True tax level can be higher if government spend the money wisely but who expects that to happen in the UK especially. We have huge government spending and most of it is spent appallingly much does was harms.
Duff engineers find quickly that their bridges and buildings fall down, their engines fail, their electricity generation is unaffordable and unreliable and no one wants to fund them… but for duff lefty economists, politicians, PPE Oxon people, ERM enthusiasts, BoE Governors…
September 15, 2025
The wrong mind set and the wrong people. To often they go for the ‘sound-bite’, not the actual doing anything about anything.
We are told
AI will solve the UK’s problems; AI is energy hungry Microsoft have already told the Civil Service that they have found they need a 25% increase in electricity consumption to maintain the service. That is on top of the 4-fold inflated price the taxpayer is funding.
EV’s are the answer to the non-existent pollution situation? There is not enough electricity available in the UK for now let alone to cope with EV’s. There is no back up.
The change in Government in Norway is causing the Norwegian Government to reconsider their interconnect energy supplies to the UK and Germany. As with other energy supplies the UK is held hostage to the whims of Foreign Powers for no other reason than personal ego from within its own ranks and its own Government contriving to ensure the UK cant exist.
The BoE and Treasury want to get involved with Cryptocurrency without understanding how it emerges, you either buy from someone or you mine it. Buying is expensive, mining is based on electricity prices the UK as we know is through its penalties for use up to 400% more expensive than its competitors. So, for the UK to have a Cryptocurrency it will cost it up to 400% more than what it would cost its competitors.
It goes on, and on. UK Industry, what is left has no chance of survival with the hyper inflated government pricing structure
September 16, 2025
I am slowly making my way through Martin Shubik’s 3 volumes of The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions. Not easily accessible without a good grounding in mathematical economics, but it does go right to the heart of what sustains value and credibility in a financial system. His pupil, Geanakoplos, has taken on the mantle and has a number of very important insights into cryptocurrencies and why their values are volatile and subject to possible collapse (and hence how they need to stabilise to become common currencies). Shubik himself thought there was a good chance of a global fiat currency emerging, and that is where the BoE are aiming. Once again we are back to Amstel Rothschild and his dictum “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.”
Perhaps a subliminal message of the march on Saturday was the text of the introduction to episodes of “The Prisoner” – “I am not a number, I am a free man”.
September 15, 2025
As I pointed out in my evidence to the ESNZ SC for their Cost of Energy inquiry, shuffling bills around between electricity and gas or subsidising them directly from the Treasury while raising other taxes or borrowing to match does nothing to lower the real cost of energy to the economy, and by introducing further price distortions it causes an even less efficient more costly system. I also pointed out that far from prices being set competitively in markets that dispatch the cheapest capacity in merit order we now have a reverse merit order system for renewables with the costliest guaranteed a market at their full subsidised price while the cheapest renewables vie for curtailment payments, and that the role of gas has been to provide the lowest cost hedges because intermittent renewables offer no hedge at all during Dunkelflaute. Remove gas from the system and hedging costs would escalate dramatically unless it is replaced by other fully dispatchable capacity from nuclear or even coal.
Gas policy has pushed us from low cost self-sufficiency through the need to import by pipeline from Norway, and then to more and more months where we need top-up supply from costly LNG – which is still much cheaper than renewables generation except during conditions of widespread energy shortage, caused by renewables failure to generate and premature closure of other energy such as coal, nuclear and the Groningen gas field and the UKCS.
Only by reimposing the proper competitive discipline of the market in place of our regulated distorted system do we stand a realistic chance of moving towards a lower cost system. Continuing to pretend that renewables are cheap and don’t come without significant additional costs, as Mr Topping at the CCC advocates in support of Miliband, is a recipe for disaster.
September 15, 2025
Its worth noting when Labour was last in power on selling our last major nuclear facility manufacture they (the Government) stated there was no place in the UK’s future for nuclear energy. Around then the the post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, was Ed Miliband.
No some 15 years on, is history repeating itself? Or is repeating past mistakes going to lead to different outcomes?
September 15, 2025
Never heard of the man before, but in saying about to-days society “the radicalisation of a generation. In the name of a new ideology, a new religion – a mix of Marxism and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship all wrapped up in revolution.” He does have a point. Down to speak at conference today, but there is a suggestion he will be missing
September 15, 2025
From today’s BBC website:
The UK and US are set to sign an agreement focused on accelerating the development of nuclear power.
The agreement aims to generate thousands of jobs and strengthen Britain’s energy security. It is expected to be signed off during US President Donald Trump’s state visit this week, with both sides hoping it will unlock billions in private investment. However, the designs behind some of the deals are relatively new and it could take many years before the nuclear projects generate energy for homes and businesses.
The key focus of the so-called Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy is to make it quicker for companies to build new nuclear power stations in both the UK and the US.
The hope is to halve the time it takes to gain regulatory approval for nuclear projects from up to four years to two.
The UK’s nuclear programme already includes plans for small modular reactors (SMRs), which are a scaled-down version of larger plants. Britain’s engineering firm Rolls Royce has been selected to design and build the first in the country.
One of the commercial deals set to be signed this week is with US nuclear group X-Energy and the UK’s Centrica, which owns British Gas, to build up to 12 advanced modular reactors (AMRs) in Hartlepool. Unlike SMRs, which are water-cooled nuclear reactors, advanced modular reactors use gases such as helium as a coolant.
There are very few AMRs in the world operating on a commercial basis such as China’s HTR-PM reactor.
The government said the Hartlepool deal has the potential to power 1.5 million homes and create up to 2,500 jobs.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: “Nuclear will power our homes with clean, homegrown energy and the private sector is building it in Britain, delivering growth and well-paid, skilled jobs for working people.”
My comment: Providing round the clock nuclear generated electricity would assist the current focus of highly intermittent supply from solar and wind. Also seriously reducing our reliance and expense of Interconnector supply.
September 15, 2025
There is no reason why securing approval for a proven technology at an existing approved site should take even 2 years. Six months tops e.g. to put in Japanese or Korean tech at Wylfa.
September 15, 2025
Repeating what was said elsewhere, “Absolute madness. If you build enough nuclear power to “prevent blackouts “you don’t need the windmills. This way the poor electricity user pays twice. Total unadulterated madness.”
Someone has a sound bite but no plan..
September 15, 2025
@Mickey Taking – Ed Miliband was energy secretary once before, and then the Government’s position was there wasn’t place in the UK for nuclear energy
September 16, 2025
Same refusal on nuclear from successive Conservative governments…. balance please.
September 16, 2025
It was actually the Lib Dem energy ministers and Clegg during the Coalition that back burnered nuclear. Osborne and Cameron turned it into an instrument of foreign policy by trying to appease the French by helping to bail out Areva, and the Chinese with their sweetheart financing deal, instead of focusing on how to invest at low cost by choosing the right technology and financing arrangements and removing reguatory obstructionism.
September 16, 2025
@Mickey Taking – the thread related how the UK’s capability was sold off to cover Labours the self inflicted ‘financial crisis’ that we are all still paying for. Not needing nuclear was the excuse given for the sale. You are right the Conservatives could have reversed things as was their right, but we haven’t seem a Conservative Government this century they deserted us
September 15, 2025
Arguing the case for cheaper energy because it is “destroying good jobs, undermining national security, paying taxes to foreign countries and making us depend on imports” will have no effect on the climate crisis activists currently in charge of our energy policy as they believe their Net Zero program will not only “save the world”, an existential threat that makes the cost to us unimportant, but also their belief that the costs of inaction far outweigh the costs of Net Zero, however high that may be both economically and socially. This sabotaging of our economy can only be reversed by convincing the public that the real science of Happer & Wijngaarden is correct and that CO2 does not control global temperature because of a phenomenon known as saturation, a phenomenon also recognised by the Royal Society. That CO2 controls temperature is clearly nonsense because water vapour, a far bigger greenhouse gas than CO2 in terms of the amount in the atmosphere (10 to 100 times more than CO2) and absorbs far more of the planet’s emitted IR radiation, the basis of the IPCC’s radiative model for global warming, is not considered to be a major cause! Eventually this socialist Net Zero ruse will run out of other people’s money and it will stop but unfortunately by then it will have caused severe impoverishment.
Reply You Go ahead. I concentrate on pointing out the current net zero policies boost world CO 2 output as well as doing great economic damage.
September 15, 2025
Reply to Reply : The economic damage argument was eloquently put forward by Andrew Bowie MP in reply to Ed Miliband MP’s statement to the House on the ‘Climate & Nature Crisis’ on 14/07/2025. I’m sorry to say it failed.
https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/e3e3c592-efdf-47ad-8b86-beed0bd4032c
Start at 15:45
Fortunately increasing CO2 is a benefit to the world’s population as it increases crop yields and reduces arid, desert regions, greening the planet. I will continue to promote the true science of CO2 and global warming where I can.
September 15, 2025
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/ccc-dissembles-in-response-to-coutinho?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=b9r3f
David Turver has shown that the answer to Claire Choutino about the cost of wind and solar is based on theoretical pricing not on actual tenders. As such it is false.
September 15, 2025
Madness is trying to solve a problem that does not exist! Climate Change is a natural event that has been going on for thousands of years, and nothing humanity does will change that.
That is the problem with fanatics like Ed Miliband and his Net Zero followers. They are trying to solve a problem that does not exist, and until that gets into their thick skulls nothing will change.
Cheap, reliable energy is the basis for a prosperous economy in the UK or anywhere else. Why build two systems when one is unreliable? Wind and solar energy will never be cheaper than gas or nuclear energy. With gas or nuclear, you only need one system. Reeves and the Treasury will never make energy cheaper while Miliband and his department are filled with Net Zero fanatics who are blind to the true facts!
September 15, 2025
The CCC, DESNZ, Ofgem and the various Select Committees are not thinking to lower the price of “energy” but the price of “electricity”. This is to push the uptake of heat pumps and the suggestion is to move all the renewables costs of electricity onto gas.
September 15, 2025
I was shocked to see the number of responses to the ESNZ SC Cost of Energy inquiry that parroted the ideas that transferring costs to gas bills was a good idea, and that gas was a high cost marginal source of power. The level of understanding about energy policy is dire, even away from the net zero think tnaks.
September 16, 2025
Sir John, you sound surprised that Milliband and Starmer’s Gang are themselves surprised to find that polls reflect public knowledge of the damage they are doing to the economy and people’s lives. they are not surprised at the damage. They are surprised their subterfuges and manipulations of data have failed to convince the (words left out ed)plebs they despise and hate. They thought they were so clever and are very surprised to find they have failed to convince. Of course they will put it down to the bovine stupidity of the public.
The VAT rate on home energy has fluctuated over the years. It was 5% from 1973 to March 2022, 0% from then until now.
So let’s be clear. Starmer’s Gang is not providing relief. It is backing down from imposing a further burden.