What Mr Cameron clearly hasn’t realised is that the main reason why our energy companies need to charge us ever more for electricity lies in his own Government’s deluded policies. He and his colleagues prattle on about how, over the next eight years, we need to spend £100 billion on building 30,000 useless, unreliable and grotesquely subsidised wind turbines. They want to see billions more spent on giant pylons and interconnectors, to carry power from the remote onshore and offshore wind farms where it is generated to the places where it is needed. Then, as even Mr Davey has finally admitted, further billions will need to be spent on new gas-fired power stations – not only to fill the gap left by all the coal-fired and nuclear plants that are due to close, but also to provide ever more expensive, “carbon”-emitting back-up for the times when the wind drops and our turbines are scarcely functioning.
For all this it is we who will have to pay through ever-rising energy bills. Isn’t Mr Cameron aware, for instance, that the declared purpose of George Osborne’s “carbon tax” due next April (which alone will eventually double our energy bills) is to make energy from fossil fuels so costly that his beloved wind farms may one day seem competitive, despite our having to pay subsidies of 100 per cent (onshore) and 200 per cent (offshore) for the pitiful amounts of power they produce?
These are the reasons why our energy companies have no alternative but constantly to raise our bills, driving millions more households into fuel poverty. And we are having to pay for all this make-believe in the name of meeting the threat of global warming, at a time when even the Met Office shyly admits that there has been no significant warming of the planet for 15 years
Not very much needs to be added to Booker's words. Regrettably the same deluded policies are resulting in fuel poverty in many other countries as well. It's time to stop the madness!
Read the entire column here
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