The BBC and other traditional media outlets keep repeating the line that our electricity prices are high but they will fall if we add yet more renewables into our system. Is this sloppy research or net zero propaganda?
BBC Radio 4 did have a promising interview on 24 September on PM when the Head of Great British Energy was asked two difficult questions. Why is UK electricity so dear? How can you expect people to switch from gas heating and petrol cars to electricity when electricity is so. much dearer?
The truth is obvious to many consumers. We are not going to buy heat pumps and battery cars all the time electrical power is four times the cost of fossil fuel energy, and all the time the pumps and cars are so dear. Nor will we believe electricity is going to get cheaper the more renewables there are, as we have been told this for years and the opposite has happened. We have so much more renewable now than 10 years ago, and power prices are so much higher.
Unfortunately after setting out good questions the BBC did not follow up with a critique of the wrong answers. We were told that the surge in gas prices in 2022 and then again in 2026 pushed up the cost of gas generated electricity and this was why electricity is so much dearer.
No mention of the big forces behind ten years of dear electricity. There are now carbon and windfall taxes on gas to make fossil fuel power dearer. The renewable capacity was only installed by offering big subsidies and a system of guaranteed high prices for the power. The system needs to pay a lot to renewable producers to switch off when they generate more than the grid can take. They have to make large payments to gas generators to stay idle but to be available for when the wind and sun switch off.
We end up paying for two lots of capital intensive systems to provide power.An intermittent one given priority when it does work. A fossil fuel one made dearer by infrequency and by very high special taxes.
It is a deeply damaging system hitting consumers and closing our industries down. Why can’t the BBC explain this or at least persist with some of the right questions?
September 27, 2026
Good morning.
To answer the question above – It is propaganda.
I believe the plan is to make energy (all forms) so much dearer that, people will look at home generation as a means to cut their bills. This, if I am correct, is quite a sly bit of government manipulation which will only hit hardest those who cannot either afford, or install due to restrictions, such equipment. This would, over time, allow the government to build fewer large power stations.
Already legislation has now come into force that allows home solar kits to connect into the house electrical supply and the grid. Kits are, at the moment, quite expensive and, you will need to shop around to get a good enough deal to make it worth while. Obviously as initial demand will fall and oversupply will leave stock unsold, the prices will drop, but the impetus to more home generation and possible supply into the grid is there.
September 27, 2026
“green” issues are handled in a very anti western way, and little is ever said about the pollution from India and China.
The Ganges River basin generates roughly 315 tons of plastic waste EVERY single day.
An estimated 600,000 tons (0.6 million tons) of plastic waste enter the Ganges river system annually.
Ocean Discharge: Between 115,000 & 120,000 tons of plastic are carried by the Ganges into the ocean each year, which affects everyone & endangers ocean marine life.
3.3 million tons (3 billion liters) of raw, untreated sewage are dumped into the main stem of the Ganges River every single day.
They are destroying the planet with their lack of civic sense & no regard for the environment.
and yet they think forcing us to use paper straws in our drinks in the UK is a big deal.
Indians should be heavily sanctioned & barred from immigrating to other nations until they can prove they are capable of being anything other than an open air landfill.
September 27, 2026
Precisely. Our usage and emissions are never put into perspective. We know our relative inflation, base rates, GDP, etc. but if this issue is so important surely there should be a league table for pollution and emissions?
September 27, 2026
China and India ove half the Worlds population – they dont pollute, they single mindedly earn money to fund thier future. Which they have and we dont
September 27, 2026
When it happens there is no sun these home systems are left without power and the homeowner has to draw from the grid. The need for large national generators remains. Batteries might enable someone to store during the day for use during the night, but there is no system to store during the summer for use during the winter.
September 27, 2026
It’s not just electricity prices rigged to destroy industry. Here in the Canary islands 95 octane petrol is 1.56 Euro or £1.35. All forms of energy are designed to ruin the country as petrol agenda 30.
We see the true agenda when the guy who slashed an empty boat is fast tracked in court for criminal damage and endangering life when no such thing happened.
3 chemical plants in Hull have been mothballed is the latest win for the eco zealots who will stop at nothing until all industry is gone.
Things are rapidly coming to a head so time to hang on to your seats.
September 27, 2026
‘Man-made climate change’ – one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the general public. It has probably damaged Britain and the British people more than any other country and population because of the obsessive zeal with which it has been followed. Theresa May, so obviously looking for her ‘legacy’, should hang her head in shame at committing us to ‘net zero’, and the same goes for every politician that has continued the lie. It’s about time it stopped or we will end up back in the Stone Age. Some of us were never taken in by the scam and others, thank goodness, are finally waking up to it.
September 27, 2026
Indeed May needs to hang her head in shame for so many reasons – her the nasty party comments, her attempt to scupper Brexit that did so much harm to the party and the duff deal Boris finally agreed too, her Net Zero luancy, her restrictions on police stop and search (which has clearly cost lives), her foolish botched election, her open borders agenda and her modern slavery act. May was also Home Sec. when the £200 shoplifting threshold was introduced to encourage and augment shop lifting in the UK which it did hugely.
Needless to say she ended up in the Lords thanks to Sunak for all these appalling failures.
September 27, 2026
giving the bodyguard of the Hamas leader a British passport, granting him anonymity, and allowing him to commit terrorism on a British passport, all done by May as home secretary.
September 27, 2026
I can only agree with you.
September 27, 2026
Correct.
September 27, 2026
Indeed and the reality is that keeping your old car for longer generally save CO2 compared to causing a new EV car and battery to be mined and constructed (which is done largely using fosil fuels). Should CO2 bother you (it should not as CO2 plant, tree and crop food is, on balance, a net good.
Touchy feely Anita Arnand (an English Graduate) on Any Answers yesterday is rather typical of BBC wrong think yesterday:- “Is that (climate change) not the bigest challenge facing us at the moment? Environmental change could put everything at risk food security, national security, everything…”
No Anita what is actually putting the economy, our defences and our farming and food supplies at risk is the insanity of the climate change act, net zero, the attack of fertilizers and farming… acts that nearly every MP moronically supported.
See the excellent Sir Richard Dearlove and the 2026 Annual GWPF Lecture.
On Any Question they had no Reform panelist so all three of the party panelists were on the climate alarmist side as usual – with the Tory taking the “touch on the brakes” Sunak position. A position that went down so well with the electorate when he pathetically abandoned ship 6 months early in 2024. Chris Bryant wittering on about the fires on farms after the slightly dryer summer this year (nothing remotely unusual and only dryer in the South).
We have seven energy ministers and junior ministers and not one has a degree relevant to energy. The CEO of the Committee for Climite Change has a classics degree.
Are people like Ed Miliband A. totally deluded morons who genuinely believe in this new religion or B. dishonest liars acting for vested interest to wreck the UK or just looking for their next job.
There do not seem to be any other rational explanations.
September 27, 2026
These green activists are really anarchists who hate British culture and want to destroy the country.
If they really cared about the environment they would oppose immigration and house building but they want the opposite. We find they care about Jew hatred more than they care about the planet and use Gaza as a smokescreen.
September 27, 2026
+1 the BBC seems to take this line too.
September 27, 2026
“Should a little more CO2 bother you (it should not as CO2 plant, tree and crop food is, on balance, a net good).” The world has seen ice ages with many times higher levels of atmospheric CO2.
This particularly true for the UK but also on balance for the World in general.
September 27, 2026
I complained to the BBC about a report on their Six O’clock radio news. They responded by saying that the words I quoted were not used on The World Tonight. I had to point out that I was not complaining about The World Tonight.
September 27, 2026
The BBC upholds under 0.01% of all the public complaints it receives. So perhaps save you time, paper, ink and the stamp!
This despite their appalling and wrong headed bias on almost every topic – net zero, DEI, energy, Hamas, the EU, Israel, the NHS, Trump, all the rigged markets, Farage, border controls…
September 27, 2026
Because, when it comes to climate change and net zero, the BBC long ago ceased to provide independent objective analysis and became Pravda.
September 27, 2026
+1 and the BBC is on completely the wrong side of the argument as usual.
September 27, 2026
JR, you ask why the BBC does… what the BBC does. Surely you’ve thought of some answers by now. You’ve been on the receiving end of their ‘interviewing’ techniques often enough.
September 27, 2026
it’s just another symptom of the main problems that the country has.
1 poor quality of the ruling class, the way they are educated, trained, selected. the way they are allowed to select each other, and their non meritocratic networks. to include politicians, judiciary, civil servants, military officers, key roles in public sector subcontracters, key roles in multi nationals.
2 unbalanced prominence of arts education and lack of scientific understanding amongst most of our chattering classes.
3 lack of real competition for political ideas, the main parties, in practice, in power, have accepted the same fundamentals which have been proven to fail the country time and again.
4 lack of a voice which empathises and supports the old white working classes, the organisations setup to do that long since abandoned them.
5 poisoned woke philosophy, which wants to be treated like a priesthood, has no self awareness, is not meritocratic, and is actively anti the local population.
Reply It is often the scientists that gave us a hugely damaging over extended covid lockdown, and advocate extreme net zero policies.
September 27, 2026
not real scientists, scientists on the public payroll long term have long since abandoned critical thinking.
September 27, 2026
See the excellent book – The Death of Science: The retreat from reason in the post-modern world [Paul R. Goddard, Angus Dalgleish]
September 27, 2026
Reply to Reply: You are right, Lord John. The science of climate and Covid has been corrupted. Data has been dumped in both cases and replaced by modelling to produce the outcomes the politicians wanted. I put this down to the Left holding the funding levers and scientists, like everyone else, have families and need to eat. For instance, the UN’s IPCC is only allowed to fund research into man-made (now called human induced) climate change and NOT into ALL reasons for climate change. In an email discussion with my college, initially over freedom of speech, or the lack thereof, the college boasted how they were employing researchers into climate change. When I asked if they were prepared to fund a single researcher into all forms of climate change and not just those which were “human-induced” answer came there none.
September 27, 2026
So if all these people and old fashioned ideas and connections are wrong,which I tend to agree with,what is needed is a strata of public able to think what is wrong,how can things improve and how this should be implemented.This is not politicians who are obsessed with competition and winning.Few are winners.Scientists mainly, although obviously competent in their own discipline are not modern philosophers who are trained to analyse from all perspectives and if correlated with humanitarian concerns have an improved chance at direction influence rather than the Illuminati type we have at present.
September 27, 2026
energy is one area where there is largely unity between Conservative, Reform, and Restore voters. it should be a top priority to codify where the common ground is, to establish working arrangements to split seats. to use the electoral system to the advantage of the majority of the country, and seek to guard against Labour winning the next election despite the majority of the country hating them.
we are in a national emergency, and it would be a travesty to allow the crazy woke leftists to win.
but this also needs the Conservative party to put its hands up and admit its mistakes, and ask forgiveness, to deal with its Liberal wing, and spell out in big letters how it is going to avoid becoming pro-EU, pro mass immigration, pro IR35 and other anti small business measures, pro hug a husky, and so on.
September 27, 2026
Not really – the Tories still think CO2 is the devil fiery hell gas but just want a touch on the brakes. CO2 is actually plant, tree, crop and sea weed food, the gas of life and a net good on balance. A tiny bit warmer is also better than colder. And it would only be a tiny bit as is very clear – even if there were a full doubling of current CO2 levels.
September 27, 2026
voters I said, not MP’s
September 27, 2026
Yes with voters I agree.
September 27, 2026
Obviously, the high price of electricity is the BBC’s fault! I expect it’s because of the licence fee, as the right launch another co-ordinated “bias” assault on the beeb
It’s definitely not because of the unbelievable price gouging of “natural” gas by the fossil fuel cartel right across the globe. Or Trump’s war on the Ayatollah regime, which has only closed the Strait of Hurmuz for six months.
Zelenskyy should follow Trump’s demand and stop bombing Russian diesel refineries, because his chum, the war criminal Putin, doesn’t like it. Or he won’t get any more Patriot missiles. Oh, sorry the leader of the free world already cancelled their last deliveries. And the 155mm artillery ammunition orders paid for byt the EU.
As our investment in wind and solar continue harvesting humungous amounts of free energy – exporting £1billion worth of renewable electricity to the EU 2023/2024 – we can look forward to another Big Oil/Gas doubling of the price this autumn, as global oil stocks run down
What was the price of diesel near me yesterday? £2.03 per litre. Remind me to email the BBC about it
Reply Still no recognition of the sky high taxes on UK fuel or the huge subsidies and guaranteed prices for renewables.
September 27, 2026
@Reply – when your tutor is ‘Chicken Licken’ might be the answer.
September 27, 2026
SG:
We import 3 times more electricity than we export and import prices are far higher than export prices.
September 27, 2026
For 2025, the UK exported ~25.2 TWh of electricity and imported ~18.3 TWh, according to DUKES 2026 Table 5.1. The monetary value of these flows was £1.12 billion (exports) and £3.55 billion (imports), from DESNZ trade statistics.
2025 was a rare year of net electricity export for the UK, driven by record renewable output and reduced nuclear availability in neighbouring markets (France). Despite exporting more electricity than it imported in physical terms, the UK still spent ~£2.4 bn net on electricity trade because imports (especially from France) were at higher prices. Generally we import 3 times more electricity than we export with import prices far higher than export prices.
September 27, 2026
About half the price of diesel is the many government taxes – plus it would be cheaper still if we had retained our oil processing refinery facilities and drilling in the North Sea etc. and ditched net zero, renewable subsidies and the market rigging and got fracking too.
Labour like to claim they have cut vat on energy – not true only cut on electricity and not the 80% that is not electricity. Also they often claim 50% or so of our “energy” is from renewables actually of our energy it is 10% and anyway there is technically no such thing as renewable energy – look up “entropy”.
September 27, 2026
Thanks to attacks on Russian refineries funded by the EU and UK and the Iranians and Houthis attacking heavy crude following the attempt to destroy their nuclear bomb programme, the US is short of diesel and is restricting exports and of course Russian diesel is also unavailable. The EU and UK os left with an extreme shortage.
September 27, 2026
And still no recognition from JR that Russia is cutting diesel exports to world markets, following ‘Ukrainian’ attacks on its refineries aided and encouraged by… the very countries, like UK, that now have to put up diesel prices to over £2. Brilliant.
September 27, 2026
Why is our electricity price so high. It’s simple, ignore all the smokescreens and absorb one number. The subsisies paid to UK renewable generators plus estimated indirect system costs since 2002 as of 26 September 2026
Just shy of £300 billion. (credit, Daily Sceptic)
September 27, 2026
+1
September 27, 2026
That’s this Parliaments economics, an overblown subsidy, surcharge and price support from the Beleaguered Taxpayer who is trying hard to fund heating, lighting and food because their money is being stolen by Parliament, is Socialism at work making things cheaper.
September 27, 2026
Make no mistake, our energy/electricity prices are high due to our government policies and intervention …and not international markets
September 27, 2026
While what you say may be correct it is peripheral to the root cause of the problem of energy costs in the UK and many other failures.
When oil was discovered Norway devised a plan on how the Norwegian people would benefit from it for generations to come, free of their government control. UK government had no thought of this. For them it was ash in the Treasury to be spent on whatever idiot politicians decided. How very British and all parties were complicit. On top of this they had no concept of how to set up a business plan. In the UK all oil and gas awaiting extraction belonged to the realm. Once extracted it belonged to the extractor. What intellectual level of political idiot dreamt that up. Whatever, this is the basic reason why our energy costs are at least four times that of theUSA and why our industry has emigrated
While accepting that Norways population is only around five million and ours is near seventy million, the benefit of Norway’s sovereign fund of three trillion would not go as far per capita in the UK. However it would be positive and could pay for some to correct their own hip defects.
However much you highlight the fringe symptoms, what I say is the root cause of all you speak of. What you constantly highlight would be more effective were you to come up with a business plan that corrected the insanity of the late sixties early seventies.
September 27, 2026
The governor of the Bank of England has warned it is getting harder to keep interest rates on hold as energy prices soar
It is singly the UK Parliament that is forcing UK energy prices high, they prefer to send UK Taxpayer money abroad for it never to return to pay for other peoples energy and energy production.
Reminds me the EU Commission no friend of the UK recently Commented that was wrong for the Danish Government to tax their extraction of Energy from the UK as their own and in doing so deny the UK Revenue of its tax take. So we subsidises Denmark (Orsted isDanish Government owned) to produce energy and they take all the rewards home. Another lose-lose from the UK Parliament.
September 27, 2026
Why is our PM driving with his foot to the pedal to disaster. We expect to run out of energy this winter as supply becomes scarce and more expensive, while Burnham is doing all he can to dissuade investors from backing Britain.
He is relentless in attacking people protesting about the daily invasion of our lands, proving his 2 tier justice is alive and determined to exclude those on the right from protesting non-survival policies by what happened to the speed with which the protestor’s leader was brought to court.
The foreign secretary, backed up by the PM is turning allies into enemies, and the attacks on Russia along with the great desire to get into the Ukraine war is positively insane. It seems he wants to get us back into the failed and grotesquely expensive EU at any cost with nothing but ideology to support his irrationality and no benefit for us.
The policies this government are running with indicate not a desire for us to prosper, but for us to suffer – there is nothing survival about them. They are destructive at every turn.
Only a government that was looking for a way to complete the destruction of this country would be wanting full blown war with Russia and pursuing our subservience to the EU demonstrates he is taking all the wrong decisions deliberately.
September 27, 2026
The book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by Professor MacKay years ago showed the relationship between countries with a high wind and solar electricity generation and electricity costs. There was a clear pattern. High renewabled: high electricity cost.
Mad Ed was asked whether he had read the book. He hadn’t.
Before he passed away at an early age Prof MacKay said that in order to have low CO2 we should build nuclear and run them all the time.
September 27, 2026
This is not the BBC’s fault. The BBC as State Broadcaster is merely putting out the propaganda as required.
Sooner or later we will run out of oil and gas. Current estimates are gas and oil will last about 50 to 60 years – perhaps a bit longer with better and more expensive extraction. Only 10 or 12 more Parliaments.
So someone had better pull their finger out.
The implications are not pretty. A resource fight means like rats in a sack. The winners are likely to be those who are most useful to America, China and Russia.
There are no easy alternatives. Fusion is years away if ever, we make a real meal of nuclear – sure it is potentially dangerous but we surely over egg that pudding. Otherwise wind, hydro and solar. Micawber thinking not likely to be any use.
Some claim CO2 is harmless ‘food gas’. Convenient fiction but nonsense, merely helps government to lie. We can be sure nothing useful will come from government and we can do nothing useful ourselves.
We British have done a marvelous job handing over all our eggs to commercial power firms with the mantra – take all you want, our taxpayers won’t pay a penny more, but your customers will gladly fork over the extra cost. Fools – we taxpayers and we customers are one and the same. We’re going to get screwed.
Theoretically Government can borrow infrastructure money cheaper than commerce. But we have ensured the lawyers and professional whiners and the money markets will wipe out and reverse any advantage. The money markets can spot a fool with no choices a mile off.
Serious battles ahead and we look bound to lose out – whichever ‘government’ we elect.
September 27, 2026
Two words, “nuclear power”.
Also please realise there is loads of coal left (thousands of years). Anything that can be made from oil can be made from coal, but at greater financial cost and MUCH greater environmental cost.
Need to change to nuclear power before everyone has to use coal again.
September 27, 2026
“We end up paying for two lots of capital intensive systems to provide power. An intermittent one given priority when it does work. A fossil fuel one made dearer by infrequency and by very high special taxes.”
Correct, Lord John, although I suspect the idea is to eventually remove the backup system for renewables and make the country accept intermittent power through rolling blackouts in order to cut electricity prices as promised in their manifesto whilst saying it is our moral duty to “save the planet” having started the Industrial Revolution. The biggest danger is that we can only afford all the renewable infrastructure and devices by importing them all from China, a state described by our security services as “hostile”, who use fossil fuels, slave labour and ignore all the environmental damage caused by mining, manufacturing tailing lakes and the illegal logging in the Amazon for the balsa wood for wind turbine blades. Relying upon China supplied renewables is not a recipe for energy security nor for reliable, abundant, affordable energy. It is a recipe for disaster.
September 27, 2026
“It is a deeply damaging system hitting consumers and closing our industries down. Why can’t the BBC explain this or at least persist with some of the right questions?”
There is no climate crisis and the Far Left would not have invented it if its “solution”, Net Zero, was not sabotaging the West’s energy and destroying its industry, economy and national security. The BBC are the real climate change deniers as they deny there was any climate change until the Industrial Revolution even though they have programmes which show we have had warmer periods, and hence cooler periods since, such as in Viking times:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p0gl9tq4/watch
September 27, 2026
Great British Energy.Their remit?Clean,renewable energy to hasten the march to net ZERO.The chairman and ceo
are both ex Siemens.Given the raison d’etre no surprise an easy ride BBC questioning.Expect lip service to gas
and oil extraction development(despite the HO being based in Aberdeen(5people recruited to date) the actual
doings will be NWEngland centred.So expect many more years of household energy price rises.Exports of
electricity at 30% kw unit cost lower than imports(and your bills)
September 27, 2026
(1) Carbon taxes on gas were introduced precisely to make it more expensive relative to electricity. This was the actual purpose, and then people say gas is too expensive.
(2) Wind and solar need backing up with gas turbines, probably close to 100% capacity. We need to pay for two systems instead of just one.
I feel these are the key issues but no-one ever says them on TV.
September 27, 2026
If I needed to buy an electric car I would switch to self charging.
September 27, 2026
This is the chart which shows that for electricity generation the weighted average CfD price is £152.22/MWhr whilst for gas (the market reference price) it is £85.10:
https://www.cfd-hub.com/
The LCCC (Low Carbon Contracts Company) website shows the amount of subsidy we are paying for the electricity from our Chinese supplied renewables:
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/resources/scheme-dashboards/cfd-historical-data-dashboard/
September 27, 2026
Those payments are uncontrollable, what people agreed and signed off on this madness
September 27, 2026
Another “terrorist incident”, and yet again we are told “not to speculate”, yet we all know who was arrested, how many people were arrested, how many vans were there.
Nothing from ministers, no “full force of the law” statements.
Tommy Robinson has been held at least 3 times under anti terror rules, which permit the police many more powers. But these characters have only been held under “Explosive Act” provisions.
Lots and lots of obvious multi tier justice. Plenty of people get arrested, and if they are white and working class their names are released by the police, within hours of being arrested.
“Do not speculate” is BS, the British state and media doing this need to be brought to account.