𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Who was it that said madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Because whoever it was had clearly never met the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. The name alone is a paradox because after two decades, energy insecurity would be the more honest description of what that department has actually delivered. Ofgem confirmed this week that the price cap will rise by 4% on October 1, taking a typical household spend to £1,723 a year.

Another £60, with exquisite timing I must say, right before winter. Energy consultancy Cornwall Insight are already forecasting a further 9% increase in January. And the only reason electricity prices aren’t higher is that Andy Burnham has taken VAT off them, which is worth about £45 a year against that £60 rise.

All of this sits awkwardly beside 20 years of assurances that renewables were the cheap option and that our bills would fall accordingly. So, let’s do the maths, shall we?

The Renewables Obligation, introduced in 2002, has now cost us more than £101bn at today’s prices, according to the government’s own figures – and that’s just one scheme.

Add contracts for difference, feed-in tariffs, the capacity market and the rest of the alphabet soup, and one recent estimate puts the cost of subsidising renewable electricity since 2002 nearer £220bn, or some £8,000 per household.

And as for our bills, the average dual fuel household paid £1,289 back in 2015. From October this year, they will pay £1,723. Labour went to the country promising to knock £300 off them and has instead presided over a rise approaching £400.

Household energy debt has reached £6bn and is expected to touch £7bn by Christmas. Whatever we bought for our hundred billion quid, it certainly wasn’t cheaper energy.

Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho put it best when she compared the pricing of renewables to the likes of Ryanair. Which is a polite way of saying it’s cheap until you factor in everything you actually need.

The extras alone here are eyewatering. We spent £1.5bn last year paying wind farms to stop generating electricity, because we built the turbines in Scotland and the cables south can’t carry the power.

So we then paid gas plants in England to make up the shortfall. This year’s bill passed £1bn by the first week of August, and the system operator reckons balancing the grid could cost £8bn a year by 2030.

I am aware that I have interests beyond whinging about Britain’s energy policy. But I simply cannot understand how a serious country behaves like this, or why nobody has been held accountable for it. At this point I might as well change my initials to EE. If “Energy Esther” makes the smallest dent in any of it, I can retire a happy woman.

Meanwhile, compare our ridiculous situation to that of Norway. Their energy minister has recently confirmed that drilling in the Barents Sea will continue no matter what Brussels decides about a moratorium. And their trade unions, which are hardly a nest of climate sceptics, are lobbying ministers to open up more of it.

Adura, the venture Equinor runs with Shell, is also waiting on Andy Burnham and his new energy secretary to decide the fate of two North Sea fields, Jackdaw and Rosebank. Jackdaw alone could heat 1.4 million homes through pipes that already exist. If he refuses, we’ll end up buying the same gas from Norway anyway or shipping it in from the Gulf with a worse carbon footprint.

In all of this, it’s important to note that households at least have a price cap. British industry does not. Which is why our manufacturers pay some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, and why our factory jobs are vanishing here and reappearing in countries with fewer scruples and cheaper coal.

Ironically, every one of those closures counts as an emissions reduction on our books. We haven’t stopped making steel and chemicals (at least not yet). We’ve just arranged for someone else to make them, often badly, and sell them back to us.

When Claire Coutinho commissioned a proper costing of our energy system in 2023, Ed Miliband cancelled it the moment his party won power. Why he didn’t want the country to know what these cheaper renewables were actually costing us is a question for the philosophers.

But 24 years into this renewables spending bonanza, nobody in charge has been willing to add it all up. And that, rather than any single price rise, is the real scandal here.