This week the Bank of England told the government, in writing, roughly what your family’s energy bill will do this winter: up a little before Christmas, then up by about a quarter in the new year. The rest of the week’s official papers explain why help is so far away.

The Bank’s letter. When inflation rises more than one point above the 2 per cent target, the Governor of the Bank of England must write to the Chancellor explaining why. Inflation hit 3.1 per cent in August, so on 17 September Andrew Bailey wrote that letter. The important part looks ahead: based on the current market price of gas and electricity, the Bank expects the energy price cap — the limit Ofgem, the energy regulator, sets on what suppliers can charge a typical household — to rise 4 per cent this autumn and a further 24 per cent in the new year. The one bit of help this winter is that VAT comes off electricity bills in Great Britain from 1 October — the 5 per cent tax drops to zero, worth about £45 a year to a typical household. But nothing got cheaper: the tax is suspended for six months, and the roughly £850 million the Treasury will not collect is carried by the public finances instead. The charge moves from your bill to the public purse; it does not get smaller.

The grid report. Britain is spending £70 billion over six years on bigger electricity pylons and cables, to carry wind power from Scotland to the cities. You pay for this through your bill: the “network” part of a typical household bill rises from £44 a year now to £104 by 2031. This week the National Audit Office, the state’s own spending watchdog, reported that nobody ever wrote a business case for the £70 billion as a whole — because it sits on bills rather than in taxes, it never had to pass the tests government spending normally does. Ofgem says the spend will still leave a household about £30 a year better off by 2031, but only if three big cable projects are sped up. The watchdog checked: none of the three has been sped up. So the extra charge is already arriving, and the saving depends on work that is not happening.

The £35 million day. Here is why those cables matter. When it is very windy in Scotland, the wires can’t carry all the power south. So the system operator pays Scottish wind farms to switch off, and then pays gas power stations in England to switch on instead. Yes — we pay twice for the same electricity. On Tuesday 8 September this cost £35 million in one day — a record, about three times a normal day, beating a £32 million record set the Friday before. The operator said it would be wrong to draw conclusions from a single day. Agreed — draw them from the record instead. These payments have tripled since 2019. The operator itself named the three cable projects that would cut them, back in November 2024. The watchdog has just confirmed none has been sped up, and forecasts the cost reaching £6.6 to £7.8 billion a year by 2030. A record day is the going rate for work the operator asked for and has not received.

The battery queue. Companies that want to connect a big battery to the grid join a queue. The plan needs at most 29 gigawatts of batteries by 2035; the queue holds 83 gigawatts, nearly three times as much, because joining costs nothing and the planners must design the network as if every project in the queue will really be built. When a project quits, the wasted planning and building lands half on consumers — about £460 million so far, on Ofgem’s own sums, and it says the true figure is probably higher. The proposed fix is a deposit of up to £25,000 per megawatt, refunded when a project actually connects. Real projects lose nothing; paper ones finally pay. And that “full” plan is small against the need: Britain’s grid batteries hold one to two hours’ charge, so 29 gigawatts stores about 58 gigawatt-hours, where the Royal Society — from 37 years of real weather — puts the storage a wind-and-solar Britain needs at up to 175,000 gigawatt-hours, ‘far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries’. Batteries move power from a windy afternoon to teatime; they do not get Britain through a calm fortnight in January, let alone a low-wind year.

The smart-appliance delay. The government’s plan for coping with expensive winter evenings is “flexibility”: electric heaters and heat pumps that can shift when they use power, away from the 6pm peak. The other word for this is “rationing”. The rule requiring new electric heating to be built this way was meant to be in force by the end of 2027. This week the government pushed it to the end of October 2028 at the earliest — and the regulations behind it still have not been written. So the tool designed to soften high prices now arrives at least ten months later, while the high prices arrive in January.

The auction. In October the government runs its yearly auction, where wind and solar farms bid for guaranteed electricity prices. A consultancy called LCP Delta reckons this round could knock £51 billion off wholesale electricity costs — but the guaranteed prices paid out to the wind farms take back £38 billion, balancing the system another £2 billion, leaving a net benefit of £11 billion. That £11 billion is a small gap between two enormous guesses, and the consultancy admits the result swings on its assumptions. Its own bottom line for an ordinary household: a £5 a year saving. Why not celebrate with a bacon roll (before bacon rolls cost more than £5, obviously)?

The carbon refund. Power stations that burn gas must pay for their carbon emissions, and that cost is passed into every electricity bill. How much? The government publishes a precise number, but only in one place: the scheme that refunds this cost to big factories that might otherwise leave Britain. The number is £32.04 per megawatt-hour — about 3.2p on every unit of electricity you use. Last year the government refunded £146.8 million of it to 115 companies: paper mills, steelworks, chemical plants. Households pay the same 3.2p on every unit. There is no scheme for you.

The pattern. The bill rise is printed in a letter and dated. The help — the cables, the smart heaters, the auction savings — is late, small, or depends on work not yet started. And the one cost the state can name to the penny is the one it gives back, to companies, not to you.