WILL JONES

Ed Miliband is set to approve changes under which households in the South would pay more for electricity than those in Scotland and the North. The Telegraph has the story.

The Energy Secretary has been weighing up whether to push ahead with zonal pricing, which would split the country’s single national power market into different regions.

Supporters say the change will cut household electricity bills overall by reducing the need for grid upgrades, while opponents counter that it will create a “postcode lottery” and deter investment in wind and solar farms.

But in a blow to critics, the Telegraph has been told that Government officials have advised Mr Miliband to press ahead with the policy.

Whitehall sources did not deny the claim, but stressed that no final decision had been made. One said Mr Miliband continued to debate the policy with his inner circle.

It could also still be blocked or watered down in later stages when other Government departments are consulted. Ministers have promised to announce a decision by mid-2025.

Switching to regional power pricing would be the biggest shake-up of the electricity market since privatisation in the 1990s.

It would result in power prices being determined by supply and demand in each zone. In practice, this is likely to mean that Scotland and other parts of the UK where there is abundant wind generation would pay less for electricity than households in South.

The proposal has pitted major energy industry players against one another and triggered intense debate about whether it will lower consumer bills.

Wind farm owners SSE and Scottish Power have claimed that the changes would create regional disparities in household bills, while spooking potential investors in renewable energy projects.

That risks slowing down the deployment of wind and solar farms in the coming years – potentially endangering Mr Miliband’s mission to deliver a ‘clean’ power system by 2030 – or making them more expensive as developers demand higher subsidy payments.

However, supporters such as Octopus Energy, Ovo Energy and Citizens Advice, as well as government quangos including the National Energy System Operator and the boss of regulator Ofgem, have argued that a zonal system would reduce costs for all households overall.

It would do this by making the system more efficient, for example ending “constraint” payments to wind farms – where they are paid to switch off – and reducing the need to spend money on new infrastructure that is ultimately funded through levies on consumer bills.

Worth reading in full.

Via The Daily Sceptic

Can Ed Miliband get any worse?

The Energy Secretary’s latest possible scheme of ‘zonal pricing’ is as disastrous as all his others

STEPHEN POLLARD

In one sense you have to admire Ed Miliband for his career-long ability to be wrong about almost everything. He is not content with handing Labour its worst defeat since 1935 by changing the party’s leadership election rules and thus ensuring Jeremy Corbyn became leader. In both his stints as Energy Secretary – first under Gordon Brown and now under Keir Starmer – Mr Miliband has also managed to find a wondrous variety of ways to inflict severe damage on the energy sector and on users of energy.

But even by his own standards, Mr Miliband’s latest possible wheeze is remarkable for its capacity to be politically disastrous. The Energy Secretary is said to be considering forcing electricity providers to introduce so-called “zonal pricing”, which would mean households in southern England pay more for their electricity than those in the North and Scotland.

Under the plan, Britain will be split into different power regions, each of which will have a different price per unit of electricity. That price would be calculated by supply and demand – which means that areas where there are already other sources, such as wind power in the North and Scotland, would pay less.

There are respectable arguments in favour of the idea. By ending so-called “constraint” payments to wind farms, which pay them to stop, there would be a more efficient use of resources. Overall, proponents say, household bills would fall. Opponents, though, say that the move risks putting off investors in renewable energy projects – the very foundation of Mr Miliband’s plan for “clean energy” by 2030.

But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, whatever the theoretical arguments, this is in reality all too typical of the wonkish schemes that Mr Miliband adores.

It has presumably not escaped his notice that Labour is in a dogfight at the moment in the North with Reform – a fight which there is every indication it is losing. It takes a special kind of genius to look at map of Britain’s current political demography and conclude that the best move Labour can make is to shake up the electricity market to make it relatively more expensive in the South – and to do so at the very time when the price of power is proving difficult for so many firms and the British economy overall.

The ideological fervour with which Mr Miliband pursues net zero is already proving to be a burden for the Government, for the economy and for the country; it becomes clearer with every passing day that we cannot afford it.

The Telegraph: continue reading