Essay by Eric Worrall
“… Time to closely regulate price-gouging gas plants or take ownership of supply …”
Ed Miliband needs a plan for industry – without it, the move to net zero could ruin UK manufacturing
Phillip Inman
Sun 19 Oct 2025 02.00 AEDTManufacturing is buckling under sky-high energy bills. Time to closely regulate price-gouging gas plants or take ownership of supply
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Analysis published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in May charted the more recent lurch downwards in output in the UK’s energy-intensive manufacturing industries. Output at the end of 2024 was at its lowest in 35 years.
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Meanwhile, factory owners face further cost increases as they are asked to pay the extra bill for upgrading the country’s electricity grid through higher network charges. Worse, a scheme to protect the 500 most-intensive energy users from next year will be funded by all factories and businesses, making a bad situation worse for the vast majority.
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Miliband, and more importantly Reeves, seem paralysed by indecision. They need to adopt the Stonehaven report or better still, take ownership of the gas supply industry. Labour has had 18 months to decide. Without a plan, the transition to net zero could wreck the manufacturing sector.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/18/ed-miliband-needs-a-plan-for-industry-without-it-the-move-to-net-zero-could-ruin-uk-manufacturing
What is the Stonehaven report? The Stonehaven report was produced by Greenpeace, and advocates imposing price controls on gas companies, to stop them from cashing in when renewable output collapses.
Power Shift: how the Labour government can bring down bills and bolster net zero by curtailing the power of gas
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Executive summary
The UK is facing an enduring energy affordability crisis that affects millions of households, undermines industrial competitiveness and slows progress on climate goals. Even though renewables are now the cheapest form of electricity generation, UK consumers and businesses continue to pay inflated electricity prices that are pegged to the extremely high and volatile price of gas.
The unaffordable gas-driven pricing of our electricity market has caused a cost of living crisis, forced the closure of many businesses and industries, and damaged our economy. Since 2021, our overreliance on gas and its volatile prices has forced the government to make £40 billion in emergency payments to help households cope with their soaring bills, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent prices soaring. These inflated prices have resulted in the UK spending £90 billion more on gas than if prices had stayed the same, equivalent to £1,300 per person.
Now the Labour government has a unique opportunity to deliver an energy system that is fit for the future: providing energy security by ending reliance on fossil fuels, and unlocking cheaper renewable electricity for consumers and businesses by taking gas power out of the electricity market.
This new research by Greenpeace UK and Stonehaven outlines our recommendation to stop gas setting the price we pay for electricity and control the negative impacts of gas in the electricity market. Our recommendation is to bring gas plants into a Regulated Asset Base (RAB) system, administered by the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO). In this model, gas plants would provide a strategic reserve of energy, at an agreed price, when this is needed to meet electricity demand. This would ensure that gas plants get regular, stable returns, while keeping energy costs for the rest of the economy stable and noticeably lower.
This policy could be delivered – and start producing meaningful savings – in the next two years. Our analysis shows that it would result in annual bill savings across households and the economy of £5.1 billion in total in 2028. This represents a saving of £65 a year to the average household and £3.3 billion across all businesses and industry. Rapidly implementing our recommendation would contribute a significant amount towards the government’s vital pledge to lower household energy bills by £300 a year. Additional bills savings can be made via a range of alternative interventions, including moving policy levies into general taxation, extending the Contracts for Difference scheme to 25 years and improving energy efficiency, as outlined by E3G’s Clean Power Mission report.
As this paper shows, this is not just an energy policy – it is a social, economic and climate policy in one, enabling this Labour government to simultaneously lower bills, support vulnerable households, strengthen British industry and accelerate the clean energy transition.
Read more: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/resources/power-shift-report/
The report claims gas plant operators would be fairly compensated based on the economic value of their assets, but given fossil fuels allegedly face imminent Net Zero enforced shutdown, that measure of “fair value” would probably be a long way from the value such assets would enjoy were they allowed to operate for their full planned life, and were not forced to withdraw from the market every time the wind blows or the sun shines.
And of course, hanging over any negotiation would be the possibility if gas plants don’t agree the plan, nod and smile, the British government could simply expropriate their assets – “take ownership of the gas supply industry”, as Britain is currently doing to the rail industry.
There is another possibility – following the electoral wipeout in the recent Welsh election, and a strong showing by the right wing climate skeptic Reform party, in one of Britain’s most left wing regions, Britain’s ruling Labour Party may be seriously considering dumping Net Zero.
Blair Institute urges Labour to reset clean energy plans in favour of ‘cheaper power 2030’
The Government is under increasing pressure to focus on lowering cost.
October 23rd 2025, 1:39 pm
Labour’s flagship clean power 2030 target is under fresh scrutiny after reports the government may quietly abandon the pledge, as a Tony Blair Institute paper urges ministers to focus instead on delivering “cheaper power 2030″.
Since taking office in 2024, Labour has embarked on a series of reforms aimed at scaling up the rollout of renewable and nuclear energy as part of its goal to phase out fossil fuels and achieve 95% decarbonised electricity in the UK grid by 2030.
Labour’s plans also include establishing GB Energy, a state-backed company intended to co-invest in clean-technology projects and support domestic supply-chain growth.
However, Labour’s decision to halt new North Sea oil and gas licensing and maintain a higher windfall levy has drawn criticism from the industry, which warns the policy risks undermining investment and jobs.
Amid growing pressure from the offshore sector, The Guardian reports that Labour ministers are considering a rethink of their energy strategy in an effort to counter the rise of Reform UK.
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Read more: https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/582755/tony-blair-institute-urges-uk-labour-to-reset-clean-power-2030-cheaper/
Who could have imagined former Prime Minister Tony Blair might emerge as a voice of reason in the British energy debate? Of course, Blair doesn’t advocate ditching Net Zero, he just wants to adjust the timeframe a little.
There is more at stake than Britain’s manufacturing sector. One of the other crown jewels of Britain’s economy, the London Banking sector, is also threatened by expensive energy. As AI driven financial trading becomes more of a thing, Britain’s Banking sector increasingly needs access to vast amounts of cheap energy to compete with other major trading centers. Banking directly contributes just under 5% to British government revenue, likely a lot more when you consider the constellation of service industries which support the banking sector. Unlike manufacturing, bankers can relocate by hopping on an airplane Fridan night, and be ready to continue trading the following Monday at already operational overseas trading centers. If the British Government loses the revenue it receives from the banking sector, it’s game over for the British economy.
Agriculture is also in trouble – between the rewilding craze, which aims to remove access to vast tracts of land and give them over to weeds, to punitive attacks on the use of agricultural chemicals and fertilisers, Britain will be lucky to have any food production left by the middle of this century.
Time is short. British manufacturing is enduring a sharp contraction, high revenue mobile industries like banking must be weighing up their options, and Agriculture is clinging on by their fingernails. Every moment the British government hesitates to follow President Trump’s example and ditch Net Zero adds to the risk the British economy will suffer a catastrophic economic collapse, which might take decades or even centuries to reverse.
My first reaction was, “Wow, the Gruniad? Maybe NetZero is finally capsizing and the rats are fleeing.”
Then I saw they want price controls on gas power. Thank God for that! If the Gruniad had turned traitor to NetZero, next thing you know, cats and dogs would be sleeping together.
The problem isn’t Gas Companies “Cashing In” when “Renewable Output Collapses” the problem is “Renewable Output Collapses” (on a regular basis) in the first place. Gas/Coal/Nuclear output doesn’t collapse on a regular basis nor even on a semi regular basis. In fact they rarely collapse when properly maintained and fuel stores kept up.
So help me understand this. Britain is working to eliminate fossil fuel as an energy source. They intend to use wind, solar and storage in place of fossil fuel and nuclear. Wind, solar and storage can’t power manufacturing. By forcing fossil fuel out of the market and cutting off their supply fossil fuel prices naturally go up due to high demand and low supply. But if the government ran the fossil fuel business none of this would happen. What the hell is wrong with Britain’s leadership? Wind and solar can’t sustain a manufacturing society, everybody knows that. All they have to due is fire up all fossil fuel power stations, open up the North Sea oil reserves. Fire up all nuclear stations. Build more fossil fuel and nuclear stations. Remove all wind and solar from the grid by doing so there will be no need for storage. Britain will have lots of clean affordable energy, manufacturing won’t leave, banking won’t leave and if you’re lucky some of the outfits that have already left will return. CO2 can’t cause CAGW stop saying it can. Government can’t run a business better than the private sector, everybody knows that. If the British government would simply stop lying and cheating their problems would go away. Britain has a government problem not an energy or a climate problem. It is that simple.
And, of course, the drop in food production will be blamed on Globull Warming and not Climate Change Policies
They see the problem but not the cause.
A country can have weather dependent electricity supply with de-industrialisation or burn coal and retain industry.
Australia and UK have both taken the former path. Rebuilding industrial economies are now a long way in the future.
So many horses have bolted already, shutting the stable door is rather late in the day.
Not only that the real reason for the high costs, namely renewables have not been mentioned.
Both Stonehaven and Greenpeace do not know how the costs are made up for the consumers making their recommendations so much bin fodder.
The question no-one can answer – and the question that it is not even permitted to ask in any UK mainstream media – is: why are they trying to do this? Its not to do lessen global warming – the political and media class have just about stopped giving that as a reason, since its evident that reducing the UK’s 1-2% of global emissions will not do any of that.
Its been alleged that it would lower energy prices, but its obvious now that it has raised them and will raise them further. And yet there is no debate on climate, Net Zero, the relationship between them, or the merits and feasibility of Net Zero anywhere in the state broadcaster, the BBC, or in the press.
A UK acquaintance who is locally active in Reform and has campaigned and posted under his own name on Net Zero tells me his area had a power outage in the small hours recently. His doorbell is mains connected, and when the power came back on it rang a couple of times.
His first thought as he woke from deep sleep was that a neighbor was in some terrible trouble and had come round for help. His second was that it was the local Stasi, come to arrest him for publishing inconvenient thoughts on climate. As they do in the UK when people publish inconvenient thoughts on sex/gender, Islam, immigration, race etc. Did he seriously consider the second?
“I didn’t think it was very likely, but I also didn’t totally dismiss it….”
The state of the UK today. Headed for a de-industrialized version of GDR on the Thames, with blackouts, and complete with Stasi.
I love the way they call it a grid ‘upgrade’, talk about ‘investment’; when what they really mean is wasting money to try and make the grid cope with the inherent problems ‘green’ energy sources uniquely create.
Energy CEOs recently gave testimony on the cost of UK energy; because of the structural costs of ‘green’ energy, prices would not fall.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/energy-ceos-undermine-miliband
The only solution to high energy costs is hiding it; shifting some costs to general taxation, which is not a solution.
In the same way that telling householders to spend £30k on heat pumps and insulation to save £350 a year is not a solution, it’s just shifting the cost.
All the fiscal drag is still there, just hidden. And the money for all this expense is cash leaving the country for China mostly.
The Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 7 (AR7) application window ran from August 7 to August 27, 2025.
However the final prices have not been published.
When they are finally published, how are they going to maintain the fiction that these renewable prices are cheaper than gas, especially as Britain has 100 billion pounds worth of gas under Lincolnshire, which could supply us for 8 years?
Labour is literally preventing British people having 100 billion pounds worth of stuff that belongs to them, in favour of wind power whose price will soon be revealed as being very high.
Ed Miliband’s plans just ain’t happening. These 2030 plans are DOA.
In May 2025, Ørsted discontinued the Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the UK, a large 2,400 MW facility planned under the CfD Allocation Round 6. The cancellation was attributed to soaring supply chain costs, increased interest rates, and growing execution risks, which made the project no longer economically viable despite government-backed prices.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: People of the UK And Everyone.
RE: No Warming in the UK
Please go to: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com, scroll down and click on the the light blue link: United Kingdom. At the website scroll down and click on: “Average Temperature by Year”. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1901 to 2024 are displayed in long table. The data shows there has no signific increase temperature in UK since 1901. The source of the data is NOAA’s data base.
If you click on “Rank” the data is displayed from highest value to low value. The ranking combines the Tmax and Tmin data. You have the option for displaying the data from lowest value to highest value clicking on “Rank”. Click on “Year” to start display of the data from 2024 from Rank option.
Am I correct in concluding there was no warming in the UK? Even if there was a temperature increase of ca. 2° C, it does not matter because there will always be cold rainy winters.
Seizing the means of production like the good little communists they are.
I don’t think that’ll happen. Now that they’ve got Lucy Powell in as Labour’s Deputy Leader, the next electoral loss will be the excuse to dump Mister Starmer the farmer harmer, and get an even more left-wing Karen PM in. One that dismissed the goings-on with certain groups in Rotheram as a “dog whistle”. It’ll be all, don’t blame me for that straight white man’s incompetence, we’ll get more renewables in pronto. That’ll fix it.
I just hope there’ll be enough Britain left for Reform to salvage come 2029.
A little too late. Last year, now almost two, I said we’re past the turning point. Industry hang on for two years hoping for a political change or a miracle but now it’s too late.They should have started building gas and coal power plants two years ago. It could be worse, the EU decide to ban all Russian gas and oil, so industry now know cheap energy won’t come back and they now can close factories. And saving £65 a year? Are they taking a piss with you? I’m not from the Uk but I think the UK will be the first to go, then Germany.
Rewilding could be easier to reverse than reversing the energy transition and industrialization, if farmers aren’t completely bankrupted. The problem will be the parallel destruction of the economy which will rob the UK of a means to capitalize farming, nuclear power and new factories. As Will Happer explained on the Joe Rogan podcast, the UK and Germany are likely candidates for a Net Zero economic collapse.
The Stellantis group are closing 15 factories. This is a direct result of the battery car mandate, and poor build quality of their cars.
Other brands are cutting back too. The Motor trade has been decimated. Nissan could go next year too.
Nissan Motor Co. vowed to close seven factories and cut 20,000 jobs after posting its biggest annual loss since French carmaker Renault SA rescued the company from near bankruptcy a quarter century ago.
The company decided against issuing an operating profit forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2026. The carmaker reported a net loss of ¥670.9 billion ($4.5 billion) in the year that ended in March.
“Net Zero is Killing British Manufacturing” Which is exactly what it was created to do.
I would believe the guardian more if they suggested all electrical generation for the grid had to be dispatchable. Just think of the cost of installing a 4MW diesel generator at the base of each turbine! Perhaps a cat c175-20 at a couple of million each.
It puts into perspective the real cost of wind power.
“ or take ownership of supply …”
WHich was the plan all along.
Got the first part right, then proceeded to retreat into the delusional bibble.
No, they need to abandon net zero. With or without a “plan,” any attempt at the lunacy of a “transition” to net zero WILL wreck manufacturing, PERIOD.
It is wind and solar driving prices up, not gas. If wind and solar were abandoned prices would fall because gas would then operate 24/7 and wouldn’t have to recover all of its fixed costs on intermittent output filling in for inferior wind and solar.
The Stonehaven proposal is actually to cancel carbon taxes on gas generation, wrapped up in a socialist nationalisation.
The nationalisation would leave NESO in charge of gas dispatch, probably trying to buy gas in the prompt spot market at whatever they must pay, instead of buying it forward as a hedge as happens currently. Moreover, by removing its market role, retailers would find themselves facing greatly increased hedging costs. Gas currently provides the lions’ share of electricity hedges because it offers the cheapest hedging option, even with carbon taxes.
Simply removing the carbon tax would work much better: hedges would be cheaper across all demand (not just the volume of gas generation), lowering costs across the board.
Serves them right for stepping outside their remit-
Thousands of jobs at risk as oil and gas firm calls in administrators
The Labour Government is between a rock and a hard place. The more it pursues Net Zero the more votes it loses to Reform. The less it goes for Net Zero the more votes it loses to the Green Party.