Increasing energy prices - why they will rise and rise and what we can do about it

Natural gas and electricity prices will get higher. British Gas increased electricity and gas bills by an average of 15% this January and is now signalling further large price increases. It claims that its profits have been hit by a 92% increase in the wholesale price of gas in the past twelve months and therefore [...]

Mr Brown’s own yardstick and climate change

Mr Gordon Brown’s recent speech was about climate change and as you would expect he tried to put a very positive emphasis on the government’s climate change policy. It is worth looking at the speech in detail so that we can fully measure the government’s climate change policy against a proper yardstick. I shall give [...]

We will all spend more on insulation, low energy light bulbs and other measures

Mr Benn, the Environment Secretary is going to require energy companies to spend more money on energy saving measures, such as insulation and low energy light bulbs with some scope for renewables.
Under the Carbon Emissions Reductions Target “CERT” (formerly known as the Energy Efficiency Commitment “EEC”), energy companies are obliged to spend an amount [...]

Smart Meters - and consulting with experts, not vested interests

I first learned about “smart” metering when I heard Joanne Carr talk about them at National Energy Action, the fuel poverty charity. “Smart” meters replace the somewhat uninformative boxes which show our electricity and gas consumption in units and kilowatt hours. Most people only look at their meters when they want to get a reading [...]

Insulate your home but keep the thermostat setting the same.

We haven’t had any snow in London this winter but when we do have snow you can see which home is insulated and which is wasting energy. If a roof retains more snow then that home is well insulated because there is little escape of heat from the rooms into the roof. If a roof [...]

The Fuel Poverty Advisory Group advises that we are not doing the right thing

About a year or so after I established Genersys I met Peter Lehmann who was then in charge of the Energy Savings Trust. We spent an hour or so talking about renewable energy and solar thermal technology. It was clear to me that he had a first class mind and acute perception. He suggested that [...]

EU renewable energy targets - renewable heat is part of the solution, not the problem, dummy!

The European Union will legally require each country in the Union to meet a certain fixed percentage of its energy by renewables by 2020 if plans announced yesterday are approved, as they are likely to be. In the case of the United Kingdom that fixed percentage is 15%. The United Kingdom has got off very lightly; [...]

Charlemagne: the Economist’s view on renewables as snake oil

Every week the Economist magazine has a column about Europe under the name “Charlemagne”, who was the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire stretching across Europe, which was neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire, as Voltaire pointed out. So Charlemagne the Journalist in the Economist is not quite what he or she infers by [...]

Energy Statistics - statistics of a climate change policy failure

Are we creating fewer carbon emissions? This can be very hard to discover. If you want to look at the world as a whole you have to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere scientifically. The last most accurate measurement was 381 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of the atmosphere. Various [...]

Gas bills - time to change the pricing structure

My gas bill came through the letterbox yesterday, and I thought I had better look at it.
My bill told me how many “units” I had used. Units are the measurement of gas at your gas meter. These are converted into kilowatt hours by first finding out how many cubic metres of gas your units [...]