Four official papers from the past three weeks said one thing in the headline and another in the notes underneath: a factory discount, a new grid company, a grid penalty set at nothing, a buy-British rule. An Oxford economist called the bill fixes rearranging the deckchairs. Then two bills that arrive regardless: diesel at £2 and January’s price cap.

The factory discount. On 1 October the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme opened, promising manufacturers up to 25 per cent off their electricity from April 2027. It excuses them from three charges on the bill: two older renewable-power subsidies, and the payments that keep power stations on standby. The government’s own impact assessment says why: for a very large factory, policy charges come to about £61 a megawatt-hour, 27 per cent of the bill, against about £2 in France. Eligible firms, most of them small, will save £35 to £40 a megawatt-hour. Without a plan, it says, ‘suppliers would pass the cost of the exemption onto other consumers.’ The plan: scrap a British carbon tax on power stations from 2028, let the old subsidies rise more slowly with inflation, and have taxpayers cover the rest. The discount doesn’t make electricity cheaper to produce. It changes who pays for it.

The new grid company. On 29 September the Prime Minister announced Great British Grid, a publicly owned company to speed up grid connections. Three private companies already own Britain’s onshore high-voltage grid; the new one will compete alongside them for new lines put out to tender. The government’s own notes say ‘the role of existing network operators remains unchanged’, and its long-term budget waits for ‘a future spending review’. Four days earlier NESO, which hands out connection offers, had asked the regulator for another month, its second request. Most of the late offers were National Grid’s: up to 37, about a tenth of the total, held up by ‘complexity and engineering considerations, such as further network redesign’. Those offers wait on National Grid redesigning its own network. A fourth company bidding for future lines can’t do that for it.

The £0.00 penalty. When a grid company misses its promised date to connect a wind farm or factory, the contract can set a daily payment for the delay. Ofgem, the energy regulator, has looked: those payments are ‘predominantly set to £0.00 per day’, and it lacks ‘comprehensive data on their prevalence or the reasons for individual values’. Lower down the network, where payments do exist, customers called them ‘token payments’. Ofgem now says it will bring in a minimum above zero. Until then, it’s the customer kept waiting who carries the cost of the delay.

The buy-British rule. On 14 September ministers laid draft guidance telling Ofgem to weigh British jobs and factories when it approves grid spending. Paragraph 29 admits the risk: ‘The government recognises that this may come with a short-term cost trade-off.’ The government hasn’t put a figure on it: its explanatory memorandum says procurement guidance needs no full impact assessment, and calls the effect ‘challenging to quantify’. A government promising lower bills has admitted in writing that this rule may raise them, and hasn’t worked out by how much.

The economist’s verdict. On Friday Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford and no climate sceptic, dismissed the government’s bill fixes in The Times: ‘A temporary VAT cut, some public money into a new Great British Grid and switching some subsidies from customers to taxpayers does not alter the costs. Nor do industrial energy subsidies. Rearranging the deckchairs will not make these high costs go away.’ He says they are ‘locked in through to the end of the 2030s’. Helm wants warming tackled and carbon priced; it’s Britain’s 2030 target and its wind-and-solar route he says are wrong. He also names a reflex he doesn’t share: ‘We don’t want to pay a carbon tax. We want energy subsidies, not energy taxes.’ This month delivered both: from 2028 the factory discount is part-paid for by scrapping a carbon tax on power stations.

The diesel bill. Diesel passed £2 a litre for the first time this week, on RAC figures; the transport minister insists there’s no shortage. In August, the government’s own figures put British diesel mid-table in Europe, ninth cheapest of fifteen. The price isn’t uniquely British. The exposure is. Britain now imports 54 per cent of its diesel, against 16 per cent in 2000, says the refiners’ trade body, after four refineries closed. America supplies nearly a third of those imports, and President Trump says he is thinking about an export ban ‘very seriously’. The war sets the price. The refineries we let close decide how exposed we are to it.

The January bill. Cornwall Insight, a leading forecaster of the price cap on household bills, expects it to rise 16 per cent in January, to £1,999 a year; September’s price rises are ‘already locked in’. On its forecast unit rates, electricity costs 3.1 times as much as gas, so a heat pump must turn each unit into about 2.8 units of heat just to match a 90 per cent efficient boiler. Its consultant Craig Lowrey comes down against easing off, but concedes ‘there are fair arguments on both sides about whether the transition should slow down given the current affordability concerns’. When a forecaster concedes that much, the question has become respectable.

The Energy Trap pattern. Each of the four papers promised speed, savings or growth. Three recorded, in their notes, a cost and who would carry it: taxpayers and subsidised generators for factories, bill-payers for British suppliers, the waiting customer for a late connection. The fourth left its bill to ‘a future spending review’. The book argues the transition’s costs are real whether or not anyone owns them, and moving them isn’t shrinking them. This month the official paperwork conceded the first half, and Dieter Helm said the second out loud.