Today we got the black comedy follow up to Sarah Teather’s stand-up routine.
Chris Huhne is going to drive down our energy bills! For those of us wondering how families and businesses can afford his
expensive climate policies, it is a bit of a joke.
The basic issue – as I set out in the new book Let them eat carbon – is that we need to invest an absolute fortune to meet the range of environmental targets that the government has put in place. Citigroup estimated last September that we need to invest about €229 billion (about £200 billion) in the energy sector this decade. That is far more than any other major European economy. We have a particularly ambitious renewable energy target and are relying on a particularly expensive and unreliable source to meet it – offshore wind.
Paying for that investment will require energy companies to make more profit and push up electricity prices by 52 per cent – again these are Citigroup’s estimates.
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