WHEREVER Ed Miliband goes, something is going to come tramping after him.
It’s the ghost of the promise he made during last year’s General Election campaign that his green policies would save us £300 a year on our energy bills.
If he would rather forget it, the rest of us should never allow him to.
So how is Miliband’s promise working out so far? Ofgem announced yesterday that its energy price cap will rise by another two per cent in October, to the point at which an average household will be paying £1,720 annually for gas and electricity.
This compares with £1,568 in July 2024 — the month that Labour came to power.
In other words, far from saving us £300 a year, Miliband so far seems to be costing us an extra £150 a year.
And far from Miliband leading Britain and the world into a brave green future of low energy prices, the Government’s own analysis shows that UK consumers are paying the highest electricity prices in the world.
Huge great whopper
In 2023 we paid on average 36.39 pence per kilowatt-hour for our power, compared with the equivalent of 35.43 pence in Germany , 20.57 pence in France and just 12.86 pence in the US.
We had among the highest domestic gas prices, too, paying an average of 10.17 pence per kilowatt-hour, compared with 4.04 pence in the US and just 2.62 pence in Canada .
Yet, brazenly, the Government is still trying to blame high prices on Britain’s energy system not being green enough.
According to energy minister Michael Shanks, the rise in Ofgem’s price cap was all down to a “ fossil fuel penalty”.
Miliband himself has alleged on many previous occasions that consumers are being ripped off by “fossil fuel dictators” — nasty men who apparently sit in their presidential palaces plotting to rip off UK households.
Sorry, but to blame rising energy bills on fossil fuels is a huge great whopper.
For one thing, the most recent rise in the Ofgem price cap has come in spite of the wholesale gas price in Britain having fallen by 25 per cent since January.
The real reason for the rise is that the Government has forced us to stump up more to fund something called the Warm Homes Discount — which subsidises energy bills for the poor.
Households are also being made to cough up to subsidise the construction of a new nuclear power station at Sizewell in Suffolk — which Miliband has committed the Government to fund despite it being of the same troublesome design as the much-delayed plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset .
And then comes the rising cost of green energy.
It isn’t fossil fuel prices that have been rising recently. It is the cost of renewables.
For a decade until 2021, the cost of building wind and solar farms fell sharply.
But that went into reverse the moment interest rates began to rise four years ago.
On top of that have come higher commodity prices.
In order to realise his dream of building more wind farms, Miliband has had to jack up the long-term guaranteed prices he is offering wind farm developers.
In the latest auction they have been told that they may submit bids of up to £113 per megawatt-hour — nearly three times the £44 which the previous government was offering two years ago and way above the current wholesale price of electricity, which hovers at around £80.
We are all going to have to pay for that through our bills.
Miliband might like to explain why Americans pay only a third as much for their electricity when they are more reliant on gas than we are.
Last year, the US generated 42.5 per cent of its electricity from gas compared with 30 per cent in Britain.
Gas is needlessly expensive here because of our refusal to properly exploit our own reserves.
Miliband has run down the North Sea by refusing to issue new licences, while fracking was banned by the last government — denying us access to shale gas reserves which, according to one estimate, could keep us all supplied with gas for 47 years.
Instead, we are forced to import growing quantities of gas in liquified form by ship from the US, Qatar and elsewhere.
That is expensive as well as increasing carbon emissions, because around a tenth of the fuel is lost in the process.
Trashing the countryside
We are paying more than we need to for electricity because of the way we are using gas power stations — in short bursts, to fill in the gaps left by intermittent renewables.
It is much more expensive, unit for unit, to use a gas power station for ten hours a week than it would be to use it constantly.
Miliband can keep bleating all he likes about “fossil fuel dictators” but he is more like a big green dictator himself in the way he is forcing wind and solar farms on communities by using compulsory purchase powers and ignoring the Government’s own planning advisers.
If his great wind and solar building boom really was saving us money it would be another matter.
But he is trashing the countryside in the name of landing consumers with ever- higher energy bills.
At some point it is going to dawn even on him that his £300-a-year energy saving promise was a foolish gesture — and one which will likely eventually cost him his job.
