Even tougher winter on way as net zero blows bills sky high

FGEM is set to announce the energy price cap for millions of households with prices due to rise by 2% this year - meaning yet another winter of huge bills. The increase is slightly bigger than analysts expected; a family using a typical amount of energy will pay £1,755 a year, up £35 on the current cap.

- Esther Krakue

This saga speaks to the very core of broken Britain. That for decades we've not dealt with this issue, and that some of our elderly now have to choose between eating and heating, is to our everlasting shame.

What makes this latest rise even more infuriating is that it comes as wholesale energy prices are actually falling. The rise in prices is net-zero related. Grid “balancing costs” are spiralling as the system struggles to deal with moments when there is either too little or too much electricity being generated — a problem that grows as we rely more on renewables.

For 20 years, our energy policy (in so far as we can even call it “policy”) has been set by complete incompetents. And Ed Miliband is chief amongst them.

It has been a masterclass in incoherence. We started with the Renewables Obligation in 2002, then binned it for Contracts for Difference a decade later, all while lobbing endless “white papers” and’ “net zero roadmaps” into the void.

EACH government has tinkered with subsidies, scrapped schemes and announced shiny new targets that evaporate as quickly as the ministers who made them. Or worse still, targets that are completely adrift from reality.