24/04/2025 09:30
The Guardian
Energy secretary says report energy pricing will become a postcode lottery is ‘copper-bottomed nonsense’Keir Starmer is now scripting Reform UK’s campaign adverts. After Starmer told MPs at PMQs yesterday that Nigel Farage would “eat the Tory party for breakfast”, Farage has posted this image on social media, with the caption.Eating the Tories for breakfast. @Keir_StarmerQuite simply, we allow the global price of gas to set the price of all electricity in our country, even when we make it from the wind and sun. And when there’s an international crisis, like we saw a few years ago with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis, the price of gas soars, and it takes with it all of the electricity we make in our country.So we can get to 100% green electricity by 2030 maybe, more or less. But that won’t protect us from these spikes in prices.Every half an hour of the day, generators bid to the national grid to be on the system providing power. And there’s a merit order of prices from lowest to highest, until the national grid has all the power it needs.The last price in is always the highest. It’s always gas.Because we’re so reliant on gas and fossil fuel markets, and that has been the long-standing situation. And that is why our plan for homegrown, clean power, our 2030 plan, is so important.By 2030 we’re going to go from a situation where gas sets the price the majority of the time to one where it sets the price of minority time.And here is the crucial point – even when gas sets the price, renewables, the vast majority of renewables, will not be linked to that price. It’s because of the contracts for difference that we’re introducing.The big picture here is Dale is absolutely right about this. This is about breaking the link with gas prices, which we don’t control. And that is 100% what our clean power mission is about.But we only get it by moving towards clean power, which lots of people in politics oppose because they say it’s the wrong thing to do.At the moment gas sets a price [for electricity] two thirds of the time in our country. And even with renewables, when renewables are being bought on the system, something like two thirds of them, bit less than that, are linked to the gas prices.With our clean power reforms, as we accelerate those reforms, by 2030 gas will set the price one third of the time. And here’s the really good news – six out of seven renewable contracts will not be set by the gas price. Continue reading...
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