Some people, including political leaders, believe that environmental levies add cost to our annual energy bills, subsidising the construction of expensive wind and solar farms, making energy unaffordable for millions of people. Sadly, these people are being mislead, influenced by the large energy suppliers, like British Gas who recently blamed environmental taxes for their most recent price hikes.
The misinformation spoon fed to politicians by those whose interests lie in the preservation of a fossil fuel based energy industry is consumed blindly by our politicians who are overwhelmed by the amount of data that they must process to keep up to date. The energy industry seems to be an area in which most politicians are especially uninformed, or worse, deceived. Consumers are just concerned about rising energy prices, accepting the information given to them by energy suppliers trying to keep their customers.
The truth is that fossil fuel energy is subsidised at a much higher rate, more than two thirds higher, than renewable energy. These subsidies are funded directly by the taxpayer, through tax credits to the shale gas exploration companies or tax breaks on investment of oil drilling and refining equipment. Since tax breaks are not transported directly to our energy bills, they are less obvious to consumers. Other subsidies funded by the taxpayer are embedded in departmental budgets, like the billions per year spent to maintain our nuclear power infrastructure is embedded in the budget of the department of Business and Industrial Strategy. Direct funding of activities by the taxpayer allows for the activities to take place outside of public scrutiny.
Tax breaks for fossil fuels are funded by the taxpayer, investments in the renewable energy infrastructure that we need to ensure affordable and long lasting sources of energy for the future are funded by the bill payer. There are many arguments that can be supported economically, that investments in renewable energy like wind and solar, pay back over the life of the energy generation because we don’t have to pay for the cost of the fuel, it is free. The cost of the fuel incorporates the exploration cost, drilling cost transport cost of these fossilised relics we use for “cheap energy”. If the taxpayer funded our renewable energy infrastructure, by diverting less tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry and funding clean energy, our energy bills would also decline, there would be no need for ‘eco taxes’.
The truth is that for years onshore wind has been the cheapest form of energy, yet development of onshore wind generation has been discouraged by this government. In June, 24% of the electricity in the UK was produced by solar panels. 800,000 homes have solar panels on their roofs and 200,000 have solar thermal hot water. Just recently, the price of electricity from offshore wind was trading at half the price of electricity from new nuclear power on the capacity market. It is time to stop the distorted, misinformed news on renewable energy and to hold our politicians accountable for supporting the construction of more renewable energy in our communities.
We can work together to ensure that we have affordable heat and electricity into the future and stop listening to the propaganda on Eco Tax, or that the lights will go out without expensive new nuclear. Battery storage is creating the reliability we need into renewable energy, eliminating the need for base load power.
Now is the time to support your local community energy group, to get behind the movement for local energy and stop accepting the highly selective news intended to manipulate public opinion coming from the media as our truth. We can create a cleaner, safer world for our children if that is what we choose to do.
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