(Image: PA)
I share our councillors’ and MPs’ anger at the casual attitude of Clayton Glass towards the welfare of its Durham workforce as they were laid off due to the firm’s closure.
But sadly the county council’s deputy leader Cllr Darren Grimes chooses to mislead people by blaming the closure on renewable energy development, which he mistakenly casts as the blanket cause of the UK’s high industrial energy costs complaining “Ed Miliband gets his green halo” in your article “All staff at factory made redundant in major blow” (Echo, Sept 23).
Basic research would show him that the UK’s reliance on gas in electricity generation, combined with our marginal pricing system (where expensive gas sets the price for all electricity sold), is by far the chief culprit behind recent energy price hikes.
This upward pressure on electricity price was made even worse by the gas price surges following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and this year’s US/Iran conflict.
By contrast, Deloitte UK reports that policies designed to encourage decarbonisation collectively account for only about 10 per cent of industrial users’ electricity bills (and Labour will lower this share even further next year for about 7,000 energy-intensive businesses).
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Logically, the best way to lower our wholesale electricity costs is to reduce national reliance on volatile international gas prices by favouring clean energy sources – which is exactly what the government’s 2030 clean power policy is designed to do.
But that sort of logical argument is anathema to parties which take large donations from climate sceptics and fossil fuel interests.