The answer, my friend, ain't blowing' in the wind
Following the revelation that we’re all paying a secret stealth tax to subsidise so-called renewable energy sources, it seems like a good time to check out exactly what we are getting for our money.
At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.
But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website. At the turn of the year, the figure was 1.6 per cent. During the cold snap the turbines had to be heated to stop them freezing and were actually consuming more electricity than they generated.
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The REAL reason fuel bills are going through the roof? Crackpot green taxes you're never even told about
Scottish Power has understandably provoked howls of protests after announcing plans to raise its gas price by a thumping 19 per cent and its electricity tariffs by an inflation-busting 10 per cent.
And over the next few days and weeks, I am sure its main competitors will announce similar price hikes — leaving Britain's unhappy householders facing annual power bills some £200 higher than they were a year ago.
Of course, the power companies will offer the normal excuses. Media-trained chief executives will point to increases in wholesale power prices, which have gone up by about 25 per cent since last winter.
And no doubt one or two will blame increased demand from Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami last March.
But none of them, I'll wager, will mention one of the biggest reasons why our power bills only ever seem to be heading up and up and why — regardless of what's happening in the wholesale energy market — they could easily have doubled by 2020.
Spurred by the Government's stubborn but wrong-headed commitment to renewable energy, so-called green stealth taxes are already adding 15-20 per cent to the average domestic power bill and even more to business users.
And yet, despite the growing cost of these taxes, you won't find any mention of them at all on your gas and electricity bills.
That, of course, suits the Government down to the ground. If it raised the huge sums required to encourage renewable energy and limit carbon emissions through general taxation it would make the Government itself very unpopular.
But by doing it through electricity and gas bills, the Government has cleverly ensured that it's the power companies that take the blame.
The fact that these taxes currently don't even appear on our gas and electricity bills makes it even easier for the Government to get away with this cunning sleight of fiscal hand.
So, what should be appearing on our power bills? First is the so-called Renewables Obligation, which currently requires power companies to buy 11 per cent of their power from renewable resources.
The problem is that renewable energy — most of which comes from on- and off-shore wind farms, solar panels and biomass plants (power stations fuelled by wood chippings and agricultural matter) — is between three and five times more expensive than power from conventional sources such as coal or gas.
So by obliging power companies to buy this more expensive renewable energy — and latest estimate suggests off-shore wind-farms could be up to ten times more expensive — the Renewables Obligation already starts to inflate our power bills.