A Place to Stand

From the newspaper that all politically correct fascists hate, the Daily Mail, comes this unofficial government forecast of our coming energy crisis (all achieved as part of the war against the catastrophic warming so widely evident)

Household gas and electricity bills are expected to rocket fourfold to nearly £5,000 a year by the end of the decade to meet Government-imposed green targets.

And the price heavy industry will have to pay by 2020 is so high that energy-dependent firms could be wiped out, causing thousands of job losses, said an industry spokesman.

A massive rethink on the cost of 'green energy' is taking place in Whitehall among senior regulators and industry, leading some to question whether the public will be prepared to pay increasingly high bills for the UK to become greener than most countries.

Officials at regulator Ofgem now privately admit that a report they issued only last year severely underestimates the cost of cutting carbon emissions by building a new energy infrastructure for the UK.

The watchdog's earlier report suggested that gas and electricity prices could double to £2,000 by 2020 to meet the £233.5 billion cost of going green by investing in nuclear energy and wind and wave power.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the Government-imposed 2020 target of a 34 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and the 2050 target of an 80 per cent cut in greenhouse gases, both from 1990, were among the most ambitious in the world.

Ofgem's worries about those figures are backed up by new research from an energy-switching company that calculates £548 of the average household bill of almost £5,000 in 2020 would be to pay for the investments in nuclear and renewable energy. note there will be no government investment in nuclear - suggests this article is still being overly kind to the eco-fascists

Already energy bills are loaded up by five separate charges to help fund the battle to combat climate change and become greener. They are the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, the Renewables Obligation, the Community Energy Saving Programme and shortly there will be a levy on investing in clean coal projects.

Although householders will be badly hit, the damage to industrial energy users will be even more dramatic. These companies, which range from steel and chemical plants to industrial gas companies, are dependent on reasonable energy prices that can, in some cases, account for 70 per cent of their entire costs...

'We are not against cleaning up the environment, far from it,' he said. 'If every country faces these costs then so be it, but the UK has decided to be greener than any other country. The huge costs involved will make us totally uncompetitive.

'We are already highly efficient and cannot cut our costs further. If we find ourselves faced with these sort of increases, there will not be any heavy industry left in this country. We will be wiped out and with that thousands of jobs will go.'

Over recent years electricity prices have gone up from +£600 to +£1,200 per household. The Ofgem report in question said another 60% was coming - to £2,000. Thus £5,000, or anything even remotely close to that means either nobody in Ofgem or the Department of Energy & Climate Change (a title that shows the department to be at best lukewarm about its duty of keeping the lights on) is remotely competent at arithmetic or, more credibly, that they figures in the original report were total & deliberate lies intended to help the government. My guess is that there are some people in government capable of counting. If so somebody among the Tories should be asking if this semi-leaked figure is truthful. Despite Cameron's windmillery most Conservative supporters are sane on this subject. Despite his windmillery the Conservatives could & should come out fighting on the government's apparent dishonesty in saying it would only go up to £2,000 per household.

As further background only about 1/3rd of electricity is domestic. That would mean the net cost to the whole country of this will be £15,000 a year per family. It is easy to see why sensible investors aren't investing here.

The total cost looks like about £100 bn a year which doesn't quite match our budget overspend but not far short. It is also something which will visibly hit voter's pockets. It seems unlikely this will encourage people to vote Labour.

Nobody interested in government not taking £5,000 extra from them (well OK £4,700 since nuclear would cost about £300) is going to vote LiDem if this gets properly reported, since the LDs say windmillery is, along with "fairness", the only big reason to support them.

Of relevance to Scotland note that the particular lunatics running our asylum in Holyrood voted unanimously for far tougher restrictions in Scotland, together with the total abolition of nuclear. That looks likely to cost Scotland £10,000 per family directly & £30,000 in total.

Of course the 25,000 annual toll of unnecessary deaths each year is now rising because of this but don't expect the politicians responsible for it, & who have always been willing to "pay the price" in human lives to shed anything more than crocodile tears on this.

Labels: British politics, Fixing the economy, nuclear