© REXDeben: denier
Today's big story has been Scottish and Southern Electricity's announcement that its energy prices are to
rise three times faster than the rate of inflation. Gosh: and why could that be, I wonder? What fascinates me is the concerted efforts made by both the Coalition and Labour to pretend that it has nothing to do with the cost of implementing the lunatic green policies to which LibLabCon remain wedded in defiance of economic and scientific reality.
Energy Minister Greg Barker could be heard telling BBC World At One - with an apparently straight face - that it was a "nonsense" that renewables were to blame. Ed Miliband sought to blame what he called a "scandal" (and rightly so - but not for the reasons he gave) on the greed of the big energy companies.
For the truth, however, you had to go to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital who has spent 16 years analysing the energy sector. Yes, a third of the rise may be due to the increase in wholesale energy prices. But by far the greater part of the damage - the other two thirds - he says is the result of
green levies and the network costs of connecting wind farms to the National Grid and of paying for all those banks of diesel generators available on standby producing expensive, dirty energy for all those periods when the wind isn't blowing.This, contra Watermelon Ed, is the real scandal. But Miliband can't admit it because, in his period as Britain's first secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change, he was the man most responsible for introducing these costly green initiatives. And, of course, Cameron's bunch can't admit it either because it would mean removing what remains of the tattered fig leaf of their claim to being the "greenest government ever".
