IT is early days, I know, but I would happily bet on which scandal will eventually bring down Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
I’m putting my money on failure to deliver on Ed Miliband’s promise to cut our energy bills by £300 a year.
It is already going wrong. In October, Ofgem raised its price cap to a level at which the average home on a dual fuel tariff will pay £1,717 a year — up £149.
On Friday, when Ofgem announces its cap to take effect from January 1, analysts expect it to rise by a further £20.
Never mind saving any money, if you are a pensioner and have just lost your Winter Fuel Payment, your energy bills are already up by £350 a year since Labour came to power.
But there is far worse to come.
Energy prices are so variable that it is rash for anyone to try to predict what they are going to be in five years’ time.
But one thing is for sure: Miliband’s green energy policy isn’t going to make them cheaper.
The £300-a-year figure was plucked by Miliband out of a report published in October 2023 by green think tank Ember.
It was based on the Ofgem price cap at the time and on the assumption that gas prices would remain very high while the price of renewables stayed low.
In fact, after the report was written, gas prices continued to fall.
At the same time, the price of renewable energy started to rise sharply.
Just before the Ember report was written, the then Conservative government failed to attract a single bid for its offshore wind auction.
Wind farm operators had reckoned that thanks to rising interest rates and commodity prices, they could no longer make a profit at the “strike prices” — long-term guaranteed energy prices — which the Government was offering.
That only changed when Rishi Sunak raised the strike prices on offer by 66 per cent.
In other words, the £300-a-year figure was already out of date by the time of the election.
Moreover, it only took into account the cost of wind and solar power itself.
It made no allowance for the fact that if you are going to try to power the country mainly with wind and solar power, then you are going to have to rely on very expensive energy storage, or some other form of back-up.
Nor did the £300 figure take into account the cost of building all the wind and solar farms, as well as hundreds of miles of extra pylons in order to get the energy to where it is needed.
That, according to a report by independent consultant Aurora Research, will cost £116billion spread over 11 years — or £375 a year for each of Britain’s 28million households.
Neither does it include the cost of switching homes to heat pumps, which would be required to reach the target of achieving net zero by 2050.
The average cost of installing a heat pump in your home is £13,200 and even with the Government grant available, the cost to you is £5,700 — about three or four times the cost of a new boiler.
All this assumes, of course, that Miliband’s target of decarbonising the grid by 2030 can be achieved at all.
Growing numbers of people in the energy world are telling him it can’t be. They include Gary Smith, General Secretary of the GMB union, an organisation which Labour usually listens to.
Miliband prefers the judgment of the National Energy System Operator, the nationalised body that runs the grid and whose sole shareholder is the Energy and Climate Secretary himself.
Even so, NESO is telling Miliband that it is only just about feasible.
And that assumes green hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage, two technologies which don’t yet exist in large-scale commercial form, can be magicked into existence in time.
If they can’t be — and they almost certainly won’t be — Miliband will be faced with a stark choice.
Either he abandons his target and keeps gas power stations open, or he relies on foreign electricity. (In the past year we were forced to import 12 per cent of our electricity via sub-sea cables, because UK wind farms, gas plants and nuclear power stations were not able to satisfy demand.)
Otherwise, Miliband risks blackouts by ploughing ahead with his net zero target regardless.
No other country has such a reckless energy policy, whatever their leaders might preach at COP conferences.
Just look at what is happening in the US, where Donald Trump’s choice of energy secretary, Chris Wright, said this week that he doesn’t care where energy comes from, so long as it is affordable and reliable.
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Miliband, by contrast, doesn’t care whether we can afford to heat or light our homes, just so long as he can boast of having decarbonised the grid by 2030.
This is an obsession which will bring down the Government — if Miliband isn’t fired first.
