Today BBC Verify asks “If the UK has more renewable energy, why aren’t bills coming down?” and purports to supply an answer (in fact, several answers). They make a passable job of explaining how electricity pricing operates in the UK, but I would suggest that they have missed some glaring truths about the way in which the net zero agenda is behind the UK’s staggeringly high electricity prices.
They start by observing that the energy price cap is to go up again from 1st April, despite this:
But Labour pledged in its manifesto: “We will save families hundreds of pounds on their bills, not just in the short term, but for good.” It also promised bills would come down by “up to £300 by 2030”.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen the claim that the Labour Party’s promise of reducing bills would be achieved only by 2030. The problem is, I can’t find that qualification expressly set out in the Labour Party’s pre-election manifesto, as claimed by BBC Verify. The manifesto does talk of cutting bills for good, of the importance of lower bills, of British families under the last Conservative government having “amongst the highest energy bills in Europe”, the desperate need to end the era of high energy bills, of a clean energy mission that will drive down bills, and so on. The manifesto did say explicitly:
We will save families hundreds of pounds on their bills, not just in the short term, but for good.
I would suggest that the clear implication of that statement is that we wouldn’t have to wait until the end of the current Parliament to see energy bills coming down (though admittedly, it doesn’t promise an immediate reduction either).
It did include this as one of its five “missions”:
Make Britain a clean energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero.
At best that statement is ambiguous. I would suggest that the 2030 date is meant to apply to the “zero-carbon” electricity target (although I note that this too has been ditched, since they now acknowledge that 5% will still be supplied by gas even in the unlikely situation where they achieve their 2030 ambition). It’s quite a stretch to suggest that the 2030 date also applied to the claim that energy bills would be reduced. But that’s what BBC Verify seems to have accepted without question, and without pointing out the (at best) ambiguous nature of the wording of the “mission”.
I have searched the manifesto in vain for words that justify the statement by BBC Verify that the manifesto promised that bills would come down by up to £300 by 2030. It’s certainly true that Miliband, Starmer and other Labour politicians bandied around the £300 claim an awful lot ahead of the election (with or without the weasel words “up to”), but the £300 figure doesn’t seem to appear in the manifesto either. The manifesto simply refers to “hundreds of pounds”.
If I am wrong, please feel free to point out the manifesto reference, and I will gladly issue a correction. For now, it seems to me that the BBC Verify analysis falls at the first hurdle.
The analysis offered by the BBC is correct when it says this:
The UK’s electricity is expensive.
Compared with countries in the European Union, UK domestic electricity prices ranked fourth highest in the first half of 2024 – the most recent government data.
This is for consumers with medium usage, including taxes and subsidies.
For industrial electricity, the UK had the highest prices – for medium users – over the same period.
At this point, it could have gone on to point out in addition (as Jit did here at Cliscep a little under two years ago) that “[t]he more of your electricity you obtain by harvesting wind, the more expensive it gets.” That is an undeniable fact, and it’s worth pointing it out, but the BBC chooses not to. There might be lots of reasons for that fact, of course, and while not acknowledging the fact, the BBC does go into the reasons why the UK’s electricity is so expensive. The main reason, they say, is due to changes in wholesale costs, and that this is linked to international gas prices. This is problematic as an analysis, since it doesn’t explain why countries which are more heavily reliant on gas to generate electricity than is the UK, somehow achieve lower electricity prices.
They seek to blame gas prices by explaining – correctly – that gas sets the price in the UK’s electricity system because:
The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers. This means that even if gas only generates 1% of power at a given time, gas will still set the wholesale price.
They then quote an unnamed Climate Change Committee spokesperson in order to back up the claim that it’s nasty expensive gas which is to blame. The problem is, that’s where they leave it. They don’t go on to ask why gas in the UK seems to be so expensive compared to gas elsewhere in the world (despite our being told endlessly that there’s no point in the UK exploiting its own gas reserves because there’s a global gas market and a global price for it – apparently). There are in fact two reasons (at least) why gas in the UK used for electricity generation is expensive. The first is because gas is relegated to a secondary (or tertiary) role in the system, with renewables being prioritised. Thus, if the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, then gas is expected to ramp down; whereas during a mid-winter dunkelflaute (such as we have seen several times in the late autumn just gone and winter just ending) gas is expected to come riding to the rescue by ramping up, often at relatively short notice. This is a highly inefficient way to operate gas generation, and it inevitably adds to the costs of the system. Not surprisingly, the operators of gas-fired power stations will also seek to maximise their revenue when the opportunity arises – such as during a dunkelflaute, when the system operators are straining to keep the lights on – by increasing their charges. In short, the more unreliable renewables you put into the system, the higher your gas prices will be. Had we simply chosen to rely on gas for the bulk of our electricity generation, with renewables playing nothing more than a bit part, then gas prices would be much lower.
There’s a second reason why gas prices are high in the UK, and it’s an entirely artificially one, driven by the net zero agenda. It’s the Carbon Cost loaded on to gas prices by the government in an attempt to make renewables look relatively cheap compared to fossil fuels. I touched on this in Voila! As I mentioned there, not only is this thumb on the scale applied more heavily as time passes (i.e. the cost of carbon applied to fossil fuels is being increased over time) those higher costs have recently been increased:
…in 2020, for CCGT H class projects commissioned in 2025, “carbon” costs were said to be £32 per MWh; by 2030 they were to rise to £45, by 2035 they were said to be £59 and by 2040 were deemed to be £70. By 2023 they have risen (albeit expressed in 2021, rather than in 2018, prices) to £60 (2025); £83 (2030); £108 (2035); and £123 (2040).
We thus have the absurd situation – comical wouldn’t be too strong a word, were it not so serious – whereby the government loads artificial costs onto gas to make renewables appear more competitive than they are, but because gas still sets the price on the UK grid, this has the effect of making our electricity substantially more expensive than it otherwise would be. Funnily enough, BBC Verify didn’t think to mention that.
The article then asks how cheap is renewable energy? It talks about the Contracts for Difference (CfD) regime, without actually using the title (it says, coyly, that the government provides developers with certainty “by agreeing a fixed price – or strike price – that they will be paid for each unit of electricity they generate for 15 years into the future.”). We are then told that the system works thus:
If the wholesale price is below this fixed price, the renewable generator gets paid a top up by a government-owned company; if the wholesale price is above the strike price, the generator pays the difference back.
Any costs or savings are then passed onto consumers via bills.
That’s true – in theory. The only problem (and BBC Verify didn’t think to mention this either) is that in practice it’s almost entirely substantial costs being passed on to consumers, and in only one year have consumers seen (much smaller) savings being passed on to them. David Turver has an excellent article which includes a graph that makes this all too clear. Only in the exceptional year of 2022 did CfDs see the operators paying a very modest amount of money back. In every other year between 2017 and 2024 we, the consumers have paid more money – often much more money – to the operators. Last year under the CfD regime was a bumper year for the operators and a particularly bad one for UK energy consumers.
What about extra costs, BBC Verify asks? Yes, what indeed? This is what they tell us:
The UK has an ageing electricity grid, which needs upgrading, partly to accommodate new renewable power sources. There are times when wind power is actually paid not to generate, because the grid cannot handle all the electricity that it could produce.
This adds to the network costs in a bill.
Intermittent renewable sources also require backup for when it’s not windy or sunny. In the short term, this role will be largely filled by gas…
I regard that as a shamefully brief analysis. No numbers are mentioned. The suggestion that extra (unspecified) grid costs arrive from its ageing nature, with an add-on comment that it also needs upgrading to accommodate renewables, is rather misleading. They might have mentioned that National Grid ESO has estimated the cost of reaching net zero as being £3 trillion. They might have mentioned that this amounts to well over £100,000 for every household in the country. They might have mentioned that the planned grid upgrade is anticipated to cost £100 billion (close to £4,000 per household). But they didn’t. I wonder why not?
They refer briefly to times when renewables are paid not to generate electricity, but they don’t tell us how much these constraints payments are costing us all. These have to date cost us more than £1 billion.
In short, as so often with BBC Verify, what purports to be a fair investigation into an issue of concern turns out to be a hit job against fossil fuels and in favour of renewables, with the story being spun to achieve the desired result, and with inconvenient facts being skated over lightly or ignored altogether. It’s difficult to reconcile the facts with the conclusion:
But a rapid roll-out of renewables would also reduce the UK’s dependence on gas – the main cause of the price spike of the past few years – and so there could be benefits sooner if gas prices remain high.
Once again – BBC Very Wrong.
Climate Scepticism 
During the election campaign I more than once emailed the Today Programme asking why these claims of lower electricity bills were going unchallenged.
On 4 June 2024 I wrote:
Dear Today Producer,
While I’m all for fact checking the Tories’ claims about Labour’s tax intentions, a bit of balance would be welcome in respect of Labour’s oft repeated assertion that renewable energy will reduce our electricity bills.
To save your researchers time, I recommend the following links.
Dr Kathryn Porter
https://watt-logic.com/2023/06/14/wind-farm-costs/
Prof Michael Kelly
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/03/Kelly-Net-Zero-Progress-Report.pdf
Prof Dieter Helm
https://dieterhelm.co.uk/natural-capital-environment/net-zero-realism/
Prof Gordon Hughes
https://www.ref.org.uk/Files/performance-wind-power-uk.pdf
Joe Kaeser Boss of Siemens
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/21/energy-bills-must-rise-pay-for-net-zero-siemens/
And on Monday 17 June I wrote:
Prof Dieter Helm asserts that Labour’s claim that renewable energy will cut our electricity bills is untrue , so why are the party’s spokesmen allowed to repeat this claim without being challenged?
Of course, this did nothing to change the BBC’s stance because it has become the propaganda arm of the net zero campaign.
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So many words without getting to the root of the issue.
In Britain after the war people would say “don’t mention the war” because it would upset their German friends.
Now it seems the unspoken watchword is “don’t mention wind droughts.”
They were discovered in Australia round about 2010 and it is most unfortunate that it was too late to avert the rush to wind power which has turned out to be one of the biggest public policy blunders in recorded history.
Trillions of dollars have been spent worldwide to get more expensive and less reliable power with massive environmental impact.
Sailors and wind millers would have known about the prolonged Dunkelflautes for centuries but the meteorologists have apparently been under instruction from the parent body not to issue wind drought warnings.
The WMO is located at the heart of the climate alarm industry in the UN and they know all about wind droughts because the first assessment report from the IPCC in 1990 recommended a survey of the world’s wind resources to see the prospects for large-scale wind power.
We really have to talk about wind droughts.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rafechampion/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
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May I make one salient point, “Electricity” and “Energy” are not interchangeable terms. The government and BBC “Very Iffy” may seem to think they are the same thing but they are not.
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Rafe S – thank you for the link. Well worth a read.
Ray S – you are absolutely right. I rail at the radio regularly when I listen to BBC presenters, politicians and others all happily confusing electricity and energy. It’s perfectly apparent, that the debate (such as it is) around renewable energy is clouded by ignorance.
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An excellent analysis Mark – thank you.
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This is a test for the British public. It takes just a bit of nous and intellectual effort to unravel this propaganda claim by the Green Blob that higher gas prices = higher bills, thus solution is to build more reliance upon renewables and decrease reliance upon gas. If the public is not up to that challenge and they fall hook, line and sinker for this relentless propaganda, then I fear there is nothing that will save us from catastrophic decline under Net Zero, because facts will no longer matter. Resistance is not a personal choice, it is a moral obligation.
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Rafe C, when I read your words, “Trillions of dollars have been spent worldwide to get more expensive and less reliable power with massive environmental impact”, it made me think of Sun-Tzu’s book ‘The Art of War’. Specifically, I think of this quote which is so good that Penguin put it on the cover of their 2008 edition:-
“Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.”
Couple the above with this from Napoleon Bonaparte, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” (https://www.azquotes.com/author/1621-Napoleon_Bonaparte) and you have a neat summary of how the West has manoeuvred itself (and been manoeuvred) into its current position of both energy impotence and energy dependence (on China’s misnamed renewables). Fortunately, there are signs that at least some in the West are waking up from their slumbers. Regards, John C.
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“The manifesto does talk of cutting bills for good, of the importance of lower bills, of British families under the last Conservative government having “amongst the highest energy bills in Europe”, the desperate need to end the era of high energy bills, of a clean energy mission that will drive down bills, and so on.”
Following on from Ray’s point (“Electricity” and “Energy” are not interchangeable terms.) and your response to him, Mark:
Yesterday’s updated House of Commons Library briefing paper “Gas and electricity prices during the ‘energy crisis’ and beyond” is interesting. And applicable regarding that BBC article dated 7th Feb 2025, because the identical quotations below are from the HoC Library’s preceding version dated 22 November, 2024.
It shows that our gas-energy prices were nowhere near as relatively bad as our electricity-energy prices!
See page 6:
Click to access CBP-9714.pdf
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Joe Public ,
That’s an excellent find, and it goes a long way towards demonstrating that the BBC Verify piece, and Miliband’s claims, are complete nonsense.
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It gets worse Mark!
“The article then asks how cheap is renewable energy? It talks about the Contracts for Difference (CfD) regime …… Any costs or savings are then passed onto consumers via bills.”
It fails to mention that CfDs are a relatively small proportion of the subsidies handed over to renewables capacity owners. This financial year, “October 2024 Economic and fiscal outlook – detailed forecast tables” show that CfDs are expected to cost us consumers ~£2.3bn whereas Renewables Obligation (ROCs) will cost ~£7.8bn.
Feed-In Tariffs (FiTs) will cost us another ~£1.7bn.
Neither of the latter are ever ‘paid back’.
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I don’t wish to derail this thread but I do feel so many areas of government policy, the BBC and indeed a very large part of academia in general is, dare I say this……. incompetent. By this I mean many of the public are simply either baffled by BS or meekly lay down and accept “authority” because they do not question the validity of arguments which allows charlatans to get away with it.
Not self promoting (well not too much I hope) but I am shortly going to review some “academic” research on “private” weather stations. Initially reading the “research” from Aston University I was staggered by how bad it was and how much factual nonsense it included – really simple crucial basics. I then looked up the authors and none, not one, of them had any meteorological qualifications at all. They were simply “mathematicians” and computer geeks putting numbers in, producing pretty statistical graphics and reaching totally wrong conclusions. The standard of data validity was quite bizarre – they used as their benchmark quality one of the worst ( CIMO Class 5 shaded sites) that the Met Office has presumably because it was local and they could take a photo of it.
In a different subject area I came across a university professor producing population data for a government report who got area populations wrong – he used a Local Authority area total population as the same named city population and was wrong by a staggering 70% -over 100,000 people. When I formally queried the error (from which he had produced numerous percentages) he argued that it was not a real error and was unimportant. Staggeringly the LA themselves accepted his report not even noticing the huge mistakes. This charlatan has since repeated the known errors in several further “peer reviewed” papers and no doubt gets away with because the reviewers don’t want their own crass errors exposed either. The emporers new clothes all over again.
Trying to bring this back to the point in question, I genuinely doubt most of those producing these reports and articles are competent.
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Ray Sanders,
You are not derailing the thread at all. The BBC would have us believe that BBC Verify is some sort of authoritative source that can be trusted by the public to tell the truth, to point out errors and exaggerations and false claims, yet it is prone to all of those faults itself.
I have little doubt that the same is true of academia. Standards at university seem in some respects (from my detached viewpoint) to be lower than they were 40 years ago when I was going through the system.
Thank you for not naming the “charlatan”. You may or may not be correct in your assessment (I have no way of knowing, without assessing the quality of his work myself), but I prefer to avoid direct naming and shaming of individuals unless I can evidence it myself. But I do take your point.
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Joe P: well done for digging up that info on relative gas and electricity prices. It would form the basis for a killer question to Milliband et al: “Why is the ratio of electricity to gas unit prices in the UK higher than in any EU country?”
On the point that it is usually gas-fired generation that sets the market price, I am baffled why all bidders are paid the top price. Why not set the system up so that, once the level of demand has been met, all the bidders get the prices they each offered?
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Anyone who opposes fracking and further North Sea gas drilling forfeits the right to complain about the cost of imported gas such as LNG, or to blame it for making other things including electricity more expensive.
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From your post, partial quote –
“the government loads artificial costs onto gas to make renewables appear more competitive than they are, but because gas still sets the price on the UK grid, this has the effect of making our electricity substantially more expensive than it otherwise would be.”
That simple quote needs to be repeated far and wide by UK MSM.
Tried to simplify it so UK pubic get it in one bite, but can’t.
ps – a gas plant standing idle still has overheads & staff to pay & still make a profit (unless they are nationalized)
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“Why have electricity prices increased over the past two decades?”
https://cloudwisdom.substack.com/p/why-have-electricity-prices-increased
…This discrepancy has given rise to what I will call the “energy price myth”. This is that the increase in electricity prices is all caused by an increase in gas prices reflected in the wholesale market price of electricity. The story behind the 2021-23 price spike is significantly more complicated than the myth suggests. Even more important the myth is a complete fabrication if one sets aside the two price spikes over 20 years.
…Setting aside the price spikes, when the margin tends to be compressed, the average margins grew from £49 per MWh in 2005-14 to £101 per MWh in 2015-24 for business users and from £122 to £176 for households. It is the increases in the average margins which have driven up user prices so much over the last two decades.
The price margins are largely determined by regulatory and policy decisions. The three major components of the margins are: (a) levies to cover the costs of subsidies and other policy interventions, (b) system and supplier costs including balancing costs and capacity market levies, and (c) regulated network charges. The upward trend in the price margins is not a recent one, but it has occurred in a series of abrupt steps. The business price margin increased from £25 in 2005-06 to £61 in 2009-10. It stayed roughly constant up to 2018 but then increased sharply to about £100 in 2019-20 and again to £217 in 2024.
It is convenient for policymakers to shift the blame for increases in electricity prices to external factors. Occasional price spikes due to gas prices and other factors, which are a regular feature of energy markets, are a convenient scapegoat. Still, we should not allow such episodes to divert attention from the truth. Over the last two decades, the steady increase in inflation-adjusted electricity prices is largely a matter of self-inflicted harm...
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Thanks for finding that Mark. I find economics very confusing generally, but that’s a nice clear explanation of what’s been happening. It’s not the market price index (determined by gas) which has been rising over the last 20 years, despite the temporary spikes in 2008 and 2021-23, it’s the real user (domestic and business) margins which have been increasing, which is due to subsidies, government policies, plus balancing costs and capacity market levies, all of which can be traced back directly to the decision to expand generation from so called ‘renewables’. It’s a pity Gordon Hughes doesn’t write for the Mail or the Telegraph.
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Then there’s this:
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“Renewables Misinformation on the BBC
Renewables misinformation allowed free rein on World At One Interview with Adam Berman of Energy UK”
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/renewables-misinformation-bbc
By ignoring the giant bull elephants in the room representing renewables subsidies and the extra costs of grid balancing, backup and expansion of the network, Berman was allowed to paint a false picture of the drivers of high energy bills. The truth is that renewables are the major force driving bills higher and if Miliband gets his way with CP2030, then our bills will rise higher still.
Perhaps we should take Adam Berman at his word and offer to pay renewables generators just the market value of their output, which on summer days can often be negative. I don’t think we will see many takers. Remember, if something needs a subsidy, it’s more expensive.
I have tried before to complain to the BBC, but the response has been along the lines of our editorial staff know more about this than the great unwashed, so we are not going to change our article or editorial stance. Others might want to see if this analysis can penetrate the citadel and force a correction, or at least a right of reply on World At One.
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There really does seem to be a determined effort now to blame the price of gas for the high cost of renewables. I think this is good news, as it suggests to me that the plethora of such articles desperately trying to persuade the public that black is white indicates an increasing desperation about the inexorable increase in prices as more renewables are added to the mix:
“Why the UK’s electricity costs are so high – and what can be done about it
From nationalising gas plants to boosting renewables, how soaring prices could be tackled”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks-electricity-costs-are-so-high-and-what-can-be-done-about-it
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Mark – thanks for the article link by Guardian Energy correspondent Jillian Ambrose. Partial quotes –
““Great Britain’s dependency on gas imports has been the most important factor behind higher gas and power prices in the market,” Kate Mulvany, the principal consultant at the energy advisory company Cornwall Insight, said.”
“Energy industry experts have rallied behind the conclusion that cutting the UK’s reliance on gas is the key to cutting energy costs, too. By generating a greater proportion of the UK’s electricity from renewable energy and nuclear reactors, electricity costs would begin to fall as gas use dwindles.
“There’s no magic number below which bills will suddenly fall lower,” Mulvany said. “But the effect of gas markets on electricity costs would gradually fall,” she said.”
“For years, industry policy experts have warned that adding extra levies to electricity bills makes it more expensive for people to cut their reliance on fossil fuels by taking up electric vehicles or heat pumps. Instead, the government could move these levies on to gas bills to encourage people to opt for cleaner options or absorb them into general taxation to avoid saddling those who cannot afford to upgrade their car or home heating systems with higher costs. Lowering the overall demand for gas should help lower wholesale gas prices, which would ease the upward pressure on electricity prices, too.”
Seems we just needed to listen to the “Energy industry experts” AKA “industry policy experts” advice & put levies on everyone’s gas or tax bills (pay more) & electricity bills will become cheap as (wood) chips.
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