This autumn gas bills jumped by a third while electricity rose far less. A research foundation that backs the transition explains why, and why the same mechanism stops electricity getting cheaper when gas does. Then an old subsidy shrinking, a chemical works pausing, a heat pump grant falling behind, the world’s renewables’ cost table that omits Britain, and a minister’s doubts about affordability.

The gas link. From October a typical household gas bill will be 33 per cent higher than in April, £200 a year more. Electricity is up 4 per cent, or 9 per cent without the VAT cut. The popular explanation is that wind and solar push gas off the grid. Andrew Sissons of Nesta, a research foundation that supports the transition and the source of those figures, says not: ‘Electricity spot prices have generally increased in line with gas prices.’ What supposedly holds bills down is Contracts for Difference, which guarantee a wind or solar farm a fixed price; on the rare occasions when the market price rises above it, the farm pays the difference back. But he states the other side himself: ‘If gas prices were to fall significantly, we should not expect electricity prices to follow them. Electricity is increasingly a fixed cost system.’ The hedge that softens the rise also blocks the fall, because more and more of the bill is what was spent building the system.

The old subsidy. The Renewables Obligation, the older of Britain’s two big renewable subsidies, makes every supplier hand in certificates, bought from renewable generators, for each unit it sells, and the cost goes on bills. On 25 September the government set next year’s rate, and the good news first: it falls from 0.472 certificates per megawatt-hour to 0.369, over a fifth fewer, mainly because many generators reach the end of their fixed support period next March. Then the catch. If the law is passed in time, more manufacturers will be exempted from April, and the department publishes the effect: the rate becomes 0.394, about 7 per cent more on this part of the bill for every customer not exempt, though still below this year’s. A cost taken off one group doesn’t disappear. It moves to whoever is still paying.

The Hull plants. On 22 September Ineos said it would pause production at its three chemical plants in Hull, keeping staff on while it tries to buy cheaper American gas directly or waits for prices to fall. They make chemicals for aspirin, paint and decaffeinated coffee, and are Europe’s last world-scale plants of their kind. Its chairman, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, puts the gas it pays at twelve times the American level. That figure is his: the trade press quotes the European benchmark at 26–27permillionBritishthermalunitsagainst26–27 per million British thermal units against 2.80–2.90 in America, a little over nine times. Either way, a plant that uses gas as a raw material can’t close that gap. The government pointed to £350 million of co-investment, to trade measures on imported chemicals, and to schemes that cut manufacturers’ electricity costs, one of them the exemption that raises the rate for everyone else. None of that touches the gas price, or the carbon tax, that Ineos blames.

The heat pump grant. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme pays most households £7,500 towards swapping a boiler for a heat pump, a device that pulls warmth from the outside air instead of burning fuel. That’s 58 per cent of the typical job. August’s figures set a record: 3,260 installations paid for. The scheme aims for 390,000 installations in the five years to March 2030. It has paid for 44,381, so it now needs about 8,000 a month, two and a half times the record, from now on. It also aims to cut the real cost of an installation by 20 to 25 per cent. So far it has fallen 11 per cent after inflation, but only 4 per cent in cash, while the typical heat pump fitted has shrunk from 10 to 8 kilowatts. The cheaper jobs are partly smaller jobs, so the day the grant can stop keeps receding.

The cost table. The OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency and EPRI, the American power industry’s research institute, publish the standard international table of what each kind of power station costs. This month’s edition finds that new onshore wind and solar farms have stopped getting cheaper: ‘compared to past editions, no significant further cost decreases have been observed.’ They come in under $100 a megawatt-hour only ‘as long as their system costs are excluded’: the backup, storage and extra cables needed because wind and sun come and go. Twenty-one countries sent in their costs. Britain, a member of the agency, sent none. The best international check on what wind and solar cost has no British numbers in it.

The minister. In New York the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, said that ‘unless we have clean power driving the system more often, we’re not going to get that impact in terms of bills.’ On the grid: ‘I’m not sure we’ve given the same attention to affordability.’ Her department’s cost figures count on building a solar farm getting about a fifth cheaper between 2023 and 2030. The table Britain stayed out of finds that fall has stalled, and that the estimate omits the system cost. Without that cut, clean power costs more than her department has pencilled in.

The Energy Trap pattern. More and more of the bill is fixed: contracts and cables paid for whatever gas does. Those costs fall when support periods end, not when prices do. The government’s sums count on solar farms getting cheaper to build; the one international check says they’ve stopped, and Britain’s numbers aren’t in it. So the lever the government keeps reaching for is who pays: VAT and some levies moved off bills onto taxpayers, and households picking up the share of manufacturers being exempted. Moving a cost isn’t cutting it.