I am really pleased to see the announcement by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, that the government is accelerating the transition to green energy and will be providing help for households on low income to cut their energy bills.
The conflict in the Middle East has made it clearer than ever the need to break our dependence on oil and gas and invest in green energy to safeguard our energy supply as well as our environment.
The action to help households on low income reduce their energy bills is welcome as well. Around 7,800 households in Liverpool Wavertree are in fuel poverty or 17.6% of the total compared with 11.4% of households in England as a whole.
The new plans involve:
- action to break the link between the cost of electricity and the price of gas
- £100 million in funding to provide energy upgrades to 100,000 social homes through the Warm Homes Plan, on top of the £1.2 billion committed in January this year
- speeding up the take up of heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles by
- investing £90 million in the manufacture of heat pumps
- expanding the programme for schools to generate their own electricity through solar panels
- making it easier to charge EVs at home, especially for people who don’t have off-street parking
- enabling green energy like wind and solar to connect to the grid much more quickly and easily
- opening up public land for use for the first time to generate green energy through solar panels or wind turbines
The initial action to break the link between electricity and gas prices may seem like a small step but it could have important consequences for the future.
At the moment gas prices ultimately determine the wholesale price of electricity even though green energy is actually cheaper to produce. The basis of the system is that gas is still needed as a fallback because green energy can be more dependent on the weather.
However, we have seen very clearly with first the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and now the conflict in the Middle East that gas supplies can also be uncertain and be suddenly affected by international events over which the UK has no control.
It’s really important that the government is making investment in green energy a priority. It is already supplying a much higher proportion of our energy needs, in 2025 it provided 44% of the UK’s electricity, and it offers greater security of supply in the long-term as well as the promise of skilled jobs as we make the transition.
