From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
OFGEM have just announced the latest energy cap, which will apply to the period April to June. Technically it has fallen from £4279 to £3280, although reductions in government support mean that households won’t see any savings immediately.
The cap is based on wholesale prices between November and January. But as I have been reporting in recent weeks, market prices for both gas and electricity have been falling sharply since November, and this means that the cap should be much less come July, maybe to around £2100, assuming wholesale prices remain where they are now.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/ofgem-announces-latest-quarterly-price-cap-update
But the announcement brought a ton of misinformation from Simon Evans, deputy editor at Carbon Brief (the renewable lobby group funded by the far-left European Climate Foundation):
Nobody would deny that gas prices are higher than two years ago, or that electricity prices are also higher as a result. However Evans is not telling the whole story, and has conflated the two graphs to mislead people.
TRICK 1
He has deliberately conflated the two graphs for gas and electricity to imply they are directly comparable. To be fair the graphs are OFGEM’s, but you will note that the y-axis is exactly the same on each. But closer examination shows that one is per therm and the other per MWh, something that some commenters on his Twitter have pointed out.
One therm equals 29.3071 KWh, so the January gas price of around 150p/therm equates to about £51/MWh, which is substantially less than the price of electricity. Since then gas prices have dropped further to 120 pence.
Evans claims that energy bills are high because of the price of gas, but clearly they would be much higher if we all had to use electricity instead.
TRICK 2
But the real dishonesty is his failure to mention that offshore and even onshore wind power is considerably more expensive than gas-fired power, despite the currently high price of gas.
Market prices of electricity averaged £121/MWh, and this price usually reflects the price of gas-fired power. However offshore wind farms subsidised under CfDs were paid an average of £167/MWh.
And offshore wind subsidised via ROCs, which account for about half of the offshore sector, earn £100/MWh on top of the market price, a total of £221/MWh.
The weighted average cost for all offshore farms was therefore £194/MWh.
Even onshore wind farms receive a subsidy of £52/MWh on top of the market price.
And these costs don’t even include the extra costs incurred by the grid associated with intermittent wind power.
If we had more gas-fired power and less wind power, our energy bills would be lower, not higher.