Letter - FUEL POVERTY

FUEL POVERTY

Dear Sir,
I would like to comment on your very timely article on Fuel Poverty on the front page of last week’s Mercury.
You discuss the problems caused by the rising cost of oil, and the difficulty many of us have in affording to heat our homes and run our cars when our incomes are being squeezed. Unfortunately, oil prices are set by world markets, so there is little the Government can do to help us, except by ensuring a strong currency.
On the other hand, when it comes to the cost of electricity the Government could help us but chooses not to – and many of us depend on electricity for cooking, lighting and heating our homes. In fact, electricity prices are rising – and will go on rising – for all of us as a direct result of Government action. Why? Because of the massive subsidies that are paid to developers to install forms of renewable energy such as wind turbines.
We pay for those subsidies through our electricity bills. The Government estimates that last year this put an extra £30 on every bill, and they are predicting a further 30% on every bill by 2020, if we go ahead and build the massively increased numbers of turbines to which the last Government committed us.
If wind power was an efficient form of energy generation that would really contribute to CO2 reduction, we might feel that this was a price worth paying. Actually, because wind is intermittent and unpredictable, it is not efficient and never will be in straightforward terms of financial return. No commercially driven developer would even contemplate installing wind turbines, were it not for the subsidies.
The energy watchdog Ofgem calculates that to build the electricity supply systems to meet the Government’s renewable targets will cost the country £200 billion over the next 10 years. This is £160 billion more than would have been needed without such environmental targets. Who pays? We do.
And sadly, even this is not the end of the story: The energy cost for industry is further increased by the Climate Change Levy. Inevitably this makes our industry less competitive in international markets, thus increasing unemployment here at home. Meanwhile manufacturing moves abroad to countries like China and India, where conventional power stations, poorly environmentally controlled by comparison with our own, spew out pollution on an unprecedented scale.
We are getting the whole answer to meeting the energy demands of the forthcoming decades terribly wrong. There are alternatives to the present strategy. We need to think again.
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan Peacock
Hamsterley