By Paul Homewood
Even by BBC standards, this interview between the BBC’s Sarah Montague and Adam Berman from Energy UK, who are little more than a trade body for renewables, takes some beating.
It is full of misinformation and outright lies, none of which we challenged by the interviewer.
The segment starts at 18.45 in, but you can also read the full transcript at the Daily Sceptic here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029zdb
The interview looks at the question of why UK electricity prices are so high.
The answer given by Berman is the same tired old lie that electricity produced from gas is dearer than renewables, and that it is usually gas which sets the market price. This is the relevant comment by Berman:
AB: In some ways we’ve been a victim of our own success which is that we’ve done a fantastic job of getting rid of emissions from the electricity sector in the UK. We’ve got rid of about four-fifths of our emissions since 1990. The vast majority of that has come from a shift coal to gas power stations because gas, when you use it for combustion, it has about half the emissions of coal. The tricky thing is the way our electricity market works, which is that gas makes up about a third of the electricity we generate in the UK on an annual basis, but it sets the price the majority of the time. And that’s because if you look at any given hour you might have lots of different sources of electricity into that; you might have some wind, some solar, some nuclear, but they’re usually not enough to fill every minute in that hour and so you end up having a bit of gas or a lot of gas, depending on what the weather conditions are and, like any international commodity market around the world, it runs on what’s called ‘scarcity pricing’, and so you end up with that final bit of generation setting the price for the whole generation.
SM: So, even if a tiny amount is used, its unit price is what sets the price for much cheaper ways of getting it?
AB: That’s correct.
This is grossly dishonest. Yes, of course, gas does tend to set the market price, but on top of that price renewables receive massive subsidies, which get added on to bills. These subsidies have to be paid because renewables are intrinsically much dearer than gas power, not the reverse.
This year consumers will have to fork out £8.2 billion in Renewable Obligation subsidies alone. Together with the other renewable subsidies, including CfD and Capacity Market, they add about 15% to domestic electricity bills.
OBR
Nowhere in this interview does Sarah Montague challenge this glaring omission.
But then there is a bizarre reference to the Electricity Generator Levy:
SM (garbled): So, over time they’ve all [sic] this clean energy comes in – are they benefiting from clean energy but they’re getting paid for more expensive gas?
AB: So, that has been a problem historically and through the energy crisis the government looked at that because, as you say, they had very low operating costs on a day-to-day basis if you have a wind turbine out in the North Sea, but you might be benefiting notionally from the higher cost of gas which sets the price of electricity. So, there’s actually a standalone tax that addresses that difference which is there to this day which [the] Treasury has refused to this day to [unintelligible] and use to bring down people’s bills.
SM: So, they’re not necessarily benefiting from [it], or at least entirely, but the Government is?
AB: Exactly.
This tax was instituted during the Ukraine Crisis in 2022, but since then has virtually disappeared.
In the first full year, it brought in £3.3 billion, but will drop to just £0.7 billion this year, and will disappear entirely next.
The idea that the Government is sitting on this money is in any event absurd. When the tax was brought in, the purpose was to help fund the support given to households via the Energy Price Cap.
In other words it is a might red herring, deployed by Adam Berman to deflect attention away from how expensive renewables are.
But there is one further comment made by Berman, which is grossly untrue:
SM: So, the charge that it’s because of the dash for Net Zero, that that has seen energy prices rise, is that correct?
AB: No, I mean, if you look at the way electricity prices have moved up and down over the last few years, it is correlated almost exactly with what the international gas prices do. Actually, if you look at the energy crisis from 2022, 2023, it wasn’t really an energy crisis, it was a gas crisis. The government had to spend about £100 billion supporting homes and businesses across the country from cripplingly high energy bills, all because gas was so expensive.
£100 billion? Really?
Of course, it was nothing of the sort, as the OBR told us at the time:
The total cost of supporting households added up to £27.3 billion, not £100 billion, a figure equivalent to a couple of years worth of subsidies for renewables!
Energy UK have made it abundantly clear that their vision is a zero-carbon economy, based around renewable energy. That is their prerogative.
Bu as with any industry body, you cannot trust a word they say.
But it is really is disgraceful that the BBC’s Sarah Montague accepted these lies without a murmur.
