from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
Ed Miliband’s deputy at the DESNZ, Miatta Fahnbulleh, has obviously been well trained in gaslighting. It’s a pity nobody bothered to teach her basic arithmetic!
Here’s her exact quote on LBC:
“The reason why our energy bills are much higher than in other countries is because those costs are being driven by global fossil fuel markets”
The data from her own Department proves she is lying.
The table below summarises DESNZ electricity and gas data, along with details of the new OFGEM Price Cap:
| Electricity Data 2025 | |
| TWh | |
| Total Electricity Supply | 323 |
| Gas Generation | 93 |
| Gas Used for Electricity | 192 |
| Natural Gas | £40.24/MWh |
| Cost of Gas Used | £7726m |
| Proportion of Electricity Used for Domestic | 35.00% |
| Cost of Gas Used for Domestic Electricity | £2704m |
| OFGEM Price Cap Q3 2026 | |
| 26.32p/kWh | |
| 54.83p/day | |
| Domestic Supply | 96 TWh |
| Annual Value of Domestic Price Cap for Electricity | £30667m |
Price cap values are calculated on the basis of total domestic electricity supply – 96 TWh – and 27 million homes for the standing charge. (In other words, not OFGEM’s “typical household bill”).
The first thing to note is that, contrary to popular myth, the cost of gas used in electricity generation is a small part of the total cost of electricity – £2704 million against a total price cap value of £30667 million, in terms of the domestic market.
Wholesale natural gas prices have risen by about a third in the last 12 months, which implies an extra cost to domestic consumers for electricity of about £700 million pa, equivalent to £26 per household. This is much lower than the overall increase in electricity bills. (Gas bills are, of course, another matter).
We can see this clearly by comparing the current price cap with that in Q3 2024, when Labour came to power.
| Comparison of Price Caps Q3 2024 v Q3 2026 | ||
| 2024 | 2026 | |
| 22.36p/kWh | 26.32p/kWh | |
| 60.12p/day | 54.83p/day | |
| Annual Value | £27378m | £30667m |
| Excl VAT | £26074m | £30667m |
| Add Back Policy Costs Tsfd to General Taxation | £3410m | |
| Net Cost | £26074m | 34077m |
| Cost of Gas Included (See Note) | £2704m | £1899m |
| Price Caps excl Cost of Gas | £23370m | £32178m |
| NOTE – Cost of Natural Gas in 2024 Was £28.27/MWh |
I have excluded VAT from the comparison, as electricity is now zero-VAT. I have also added back into current costings the policy costs, mainly ROC subsidies, which have now been transferred from energy bills to general taxation – according to OFGEM, these are £130pa per household. We still have to pay these one way or another.
Since 2024, electricity costs, adjusted as noted, have increased from £26,074 million to £34,077 million, an increase of 30.6% or £296 per household.
Yet the cost of gas used in generation has only risen by £805 million.
The bulk of the increase has therefore not been due to the rise in international gas prices, but other factors, all of which ultimately lie within the control of the government, one way or another.
These extra costs include renewable subsidies, higher network costs and higher balancing costs. They also include windfall profits for non-gas generators, who have benefitted from higher wholesale prices, on the back of gas prices.
If Miatta wants lower prices, she needs to get her own house in order, instead of blaming fossil fuels.
Another DEI appointment. I bet she is a great fan of Kamala.
Her father was a security head in darkest Liberia. He had a militia etc and things went poorly so he claimed asylum here in Britain. A novel upbringing…
Labour remains committed to no drilling at all – Jackdaw and Rosebank are still in limbo. And so we buy [some] gas from our neighbour, Norway from the same fields in the North Sea, rather than get our hands dirty.
It is the triumph of ideology over common sense and reason, Fabian Labour through and through.
It’s hard to be sympathetic for people who won’t help themselves.
“The data from her own Department proves she is lying.”
That, and probably just plain ignorant. Typical DEI appointment.
I doubt she is lying consciously. She isn’t bright enough.
“She lies by reflex, she lies even when she doesn’t have to just to keep her hand in”. Someone who knows.
I came across this elsewhere. Seems to rhyme. Her ignorance is irrelevant.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed. … The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
I’ve been resisting the approved narrative of forestry officials in Wokeachusetts for 50 years. They’ve tried to destroy me several times but failed. I’m sure my ranting and raving for all those years has had some positive effect on forestry policies- but of course they’ll NEVER admit it.
You just know she is not long to be in her role as energy secretary when she makes such blatant public errors as this.
She is promoting fiction as fact and thinks people will simply accept that because she says it is so.
We need a general election in the UK and fast. There are too many people in government that tell complete lies claiming they are speaking truth.
What some may not realise is mad Ed knew his time at DESNZ was more or less up, but he had prepared for that by stuffing the department with his more zealotrous acolytes – Fahnbuelleh included.
That way he knew he could focus on his ‘global mission’… a la pied piper.
——————
There once was a charming young Senator named Albert A. Gore (D-Tennessee) b. 1948.
A legendary figure, he claimed inventorship of the ARPA-Net (Internet), and of the eponymous “Al am I” <=> “A.I.”
Of no known relation to his compatriots: Ms. Parton, ‘Dolly’; or Mr. Presley, ‘King’ Elvis.
He followed the prophets of old (Revelle, Keeling), faithfully transcribing Apocalyptics into a little book, Earth in the Balance.
And Cinematically with Truth? – How Inconvenient!, & its flautist (piper’s) soundtrack.
He met the late King of Norway to receive his Peace-they-cried Prize.
And became fabulously wealthy as a preacher to the haughty Davoisie.
The incompetence in the UK is depressing:
Labour has appointed six ministers to DESNZ. However, analysis of their background and experience (see below) reveals two with PPE degrees, one with a degree in history, another with a degree in political studies and one with a degree in history and politics. There’s also one minister gaining a degree in Russian studies before studying law. Not one of them has a background in science, engineering or maths. Almost all of them have worked in the public sector for their whole lives, so between them, there is precious little experience of the commercial world and no experience of the energy sector. Ed Miliband and Miatta Fahnbulleh have qualifications in economics, but the latter describes herself as a “heterodox economist” and she has advocated “flooding the market with cheaper renewables” and introducing “free basic energy”. It can only be ‘heterodox economists’ who think more expensive, intermittent renewables are cheap and think energy is free.
There are three spads listed for Ed Miliband. Jonty Leibowitz studied history at Cambridge. Tobias Garnett studied law at City and then went to study at the Harvard Kennedy School where his thesis was entitled ‘A Just Transition to a Fairer Economy: Labour’s plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.’ Eleanor Salter is the final spad, shared with DEFRA, and it is unclear what her degree subject was but she writes for the Guardian and apparently she is particularly focused on “integrating nature into the climate offer”. No evidence of STEM backgrounds amongst the spads either.
You might think this does not matter, because ministers simply oversee the department and it is civil servants that really run the show. There are seven senior civil servants listed on the DESNZ website. But when you look at their background a similar picture emerges (see below). There are degrees in modern history, geography and modern languages, but precious little evidence of a STEM background anywhere. Only the Chief Scientific Advisor has any sort of science background and that is in chemistry, with a special focus on astrochemistry. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the senior civil servants have any significant experience outside the public sector. There is no evidence of experience in proper commercial businesses in any sector, let alone energy.
The rot does not stop in DESNZ. The department might turn to advisors like the National Grid Electricity System Operator, who have recently published their future energy pathways. Their Strategy and Policy Director, Claire Dykta, oversaw the work and wrote the foreword to the new document. Claire describes herself as a “leading influencer in the energy industry”, as though she was running a TikTok channel. Claire graduated from Aston with a degree in management, business and law, so no evidence of a STEM background either.
DESNZ ministers might look to the Climate Change Committee for advice or instructions. The CCC is currently without a chairman and CEO, but former chairman Lord Deben has a degree in history and former CEO Chris Stark studied finance and law. Despite never delivering anything more taxing than pizza, Stark has been drafted in to lead mission control to deliver a decarbonised grid by 2030. It is thought that Emma Pinchbeck, CEO of renewables cheerleader Energy U.K., is going to take over as CEO of the CCC. Emma has a classics degree from Oxford and began her career as a climate campaigner for WWF. Again, we find no evidence of any STEM expertise or proper commercial experience.
==
From Daily Sceptic
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/28/desnz-has-net-zero-competence/
From Guido Fawkes…
Ed Miliband’s Close Allies & Ex-Advisers Installed as DESNZ Ministers
Ed Miliband has left behind a squad of his proteges and allies running DESNZ. He’s got two departments for the price of one…
Polly Billington was a SpAd [Special Advisor] to Miliband
Katie White a former eco-campaigner
Martin McCluskey is another former adviser to Ed Miliband
Michael Shanks is another Fabian and was only made an MP in 2023. He was Minister for Energy and as the MP for Rutherglen was a dutiful errand boy for Miliband in Scotland.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is a personal protege of Miliband’s
———–
These people are total idealogues.
Sack them all.
It’s only natural that incompetent “leaders” appoint completely incompetent people to positions that require the highest level of competence in a given area. However, they are so incompetent that they don’t even realize they are incompetent. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It is called the “May the best man win” strategy wherein the boss always appoints people who are less capable than themselves so they are always the “best man” available and so is secure in his position. Miliband would have searched hard to find those less competent than himself but he has obviously succeeded. Britain is surely deep in the dwang.
The lack of any SYEM credentials only appears bad (among your ruling class and ours), but remember, they have “Scientists” advising them providing the “Truth” of “The Science”. And who better to lead the leaders in the “Truth” than the very “sScientists” who created “The Science”?
The grid must be “upgraded” to do what? The need for upgrading is simply a half-truth. The grid distributes and stabilizes electric power. It does not produce it. Should “net zero” ever be achieved the grid will distribute zero electricity, however it is “upgraded” when it is nighttime, or cloudy, or windless, or when wind and solar are varying widely with no way to economically trim off the peaks and fill in the valleys. These facts have been clearly established by the net zero experiments on El Hierro and King islands. Fahnbulleh surely knows this, so why is she not telling the whole truth? Because she is simply spreading her half-truths to secure her political position. Is there any other possible reason? Anything?
Basically we need two sets of generation and two sets of distribution. The intermittant generators take precidence over the baseload generators which then have to run inefficently. Somehow doubling your assets and running them badly is going to reduce electricity costs. Such are the unicorn fart dreams of PPE graduates.
Gas is being used because wind and solar have zero ability to respond to and supply load demand.
They are unsuitable for the purpose. If they were useful and able to supply demand as needed, no gas would be burned.
Politicians should not be allowed to use the word “investment”. Their investments always generate ongoing losses. If the project was a viable investment there would be no need for government to fund it.
No need to make it complicated. As the Uk loves Ukraine so much explain why Ukraine pay so little for energy. We’re all using the same gas.
But indeed, without fossil fuels for energy the energy bill would be much lower, you don’t have to pay when there’s no energy.
So increasing fossil energy costs have increased costs to consumers. Fossil energy is expensive
Higher cost per installed watt or btu raises the overall cost of energy to a service area over time. Price risk is built into fossil fuel power project engineering economics while alternative energy projects permanently dependent on tax subsidies carry their own additional costs that may or may not get counted. The goal of Net Zero does not equate to the goal of competitiveness or fiscal accountability.
You might ask why a PhD energy economist would waste time trying to educate trolls like I once did when they tried to argue that fracking oil and gas wells did not pay for themselves. I guess it’s a break in between playing computer games and doing yard work. Why do trolls do the things they do–money?
The implementation of wind and solar on to a grid is FAR more expensive that gas or coal.
The grid has to be updated, at great cost, to manage the erratic intermittency of wind and solar. Then you have all the subsidies and other massive payments to wind and solar just to build them and keep them financial.
Not to mention the massive environmental pollution and damage done by wind and solar at all stages from manufacturing, through installation, in use and at end of short non-productive life.
Clever stuff, this fossil energy. Its global price makes it more expensive in the UK than anywhere else.
So, let’s see if we can disentangle the twisted “logic” of the Climate/Energy Liars:
Oh, what a tangled web they weave.
Glad you were able to make at least some sense of the nonsense. 🙂
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the UK market works.
The calculation of the impact of gas isn’t based on the proportion of energy that gas supplies, it’s based on the proportion of the time gas is used in any 5min bidding period.
For example if renewables provide 99% of the energy in a 5min period and gas provides 1% then it’s the high priced gas bid that sets the price across the whole market for that 5min.
That only sets the wholesale price of electricity, which is becoming a smaller part of the final total cost as the green levies, constraint payments, guarenteed prices increase.
That has nothing to do with the argument made.
Renewables are an expensive joke
And their manufacturing process is filthy and highly polluting.
They are highly destructive of the environment wherever they are implemented.
And they produce vast volumes of toxic landfill at the end of their short parasitic lives.
No they’re not. I used to dislike wind but even that is working out. They have high upfront cost but low on going cost that only benefit after time due to the lag. UK needs more storage to make it happen as gas is killing the zero fuel cost benefit.
There is no practical economic way to store wind and solar power.
Batteries are now economical enough to do it.
No they aren’t. If they were, they would be in use in Britain’s national grid and there would be no need for gas. In reality, when wind power is plentiful, wind farms are paid not to produce power.
They are and they’re being deployed. For example Google says
UK grid scale battery storage is not used for long term power storage but just for balancing purposes over very short time periods. It is far too expensive to use for long term power storage.
It doesn’t need to be long term. It just needs to be enough to replace gas usage on an average day and that will make all the difference. Do yourself a favour and watch the video I posted above so you can understand.
Battery storage is just too expensive to use in that way. That is why nobody in the world is doing it.
You’re wrong and you didn’t watch the video.
Despite what apologists for useless renewables claim, Britain has no credible plans to replace gas with battery storage. The cost is far too great.
Despite what you believe…it’s already happening.
It’s bizarrely comical that you believe propaganda from the renewables lobby. It’s bad enough that politicians believe this tripe; at least they have the excuse of innumeracy and gross stupidity.
It’s bizarrely comical that you can’t accept that Australia has already proven that batteries are cheap enough to deploy at a scale that displaces gas and decreases prices…exactly as expected.
It’s bizarrely comical that you can’t accept the truth that the UK is deploying batteries at scale to ultimately achieve the same thing. That isn’t propaganda, it’s an easily confirmable fact.
Why grid scale battery backup is a fantasy.
https://medium.com/steves-tech-talk/the-storage-fantasy-why-grid-scale-batteries-arent-the-solution-0a892180a8be
Your reference says
And is demonstrably wrong. Just watch the video.
You are obviously a fantasist who cannot handle reality. There is no point continuing this conversation.
I doubt you watched the video. It proves that batteries are economical enough to displace gas a reduce prices. The references you give argue otherwise but that argument has simply been proven wrong.
In the US, 1 million people use, on average, 34.3 GWh per day.
In general, each million people require an average continuous power capacity of 1.43 GW operating around the clock.
I am sure the number vary from one country to another, but this at least gives some idea if 12.9 GWh is or is not a lot for a country of…how many people?
In the US, 12.9 GWh is enough for a few hours for a single medium population county in Florida.
Multiply that number by three and then by another 350 and it would last a day for the US.
Once it was charged up that is.
Unlike nuclear, batteries do not produce a single watt of power.
Nuclear plants last many decades.
How long for batteries?
Your argument is irrelevant. The grid only needs enough battery storage to remove the need for the most expensive bid and that’s gas.
People are black and white with their arguments against renewables. There can be baseload generation such as coal or nuclear on the grid for a long time to come but somehow they always take the extreme view that it has to be all renewable or nothing.
It’s the classic strawman argument.
It has everything to do with your post, you cherry picked one element of the end cost and made out it was the sole reason for the increase. But its not as the wholesale costs are becoming a smaller proportion of the final price. So even when the gas price dropped back to pre Ukraine prices the cost to the consumer was still higher and will be higher still when gas prices drop again. Look up the AR8 planned prices and tell us why they are so much higher than AR7, also when the Floating wind turbines are flooding the North Sea who will be paying for their high cost electricity.
In the OP and your assumpion as well, the wholesale price is assumed to be based on the price of the gas but that’s completely wrong. Completely wrong.
The subsequent argument that the retail cost is wholesale price based on cost of gas plus subsidies is fundamentally an incorrect and bad argument.
It’s not cherry picking, it’s the way the market prices the energy.
You just don’t understand how the rigged energy market operates in Britain. The bosses of Britain’s energy companies had to explain what is going on to MPs who had fallen for the same nonsense as you. They explained that even if the price of gas fell by half, electricity prices were still expected to rise by 20% by 2030 because of all the guaranteed subsidies and costs of renewable energy. One of them even said that even if the price of gas fell to zero, it wouldn’t cut the price of electricity in 2030 compared to today.
https://www.gbnews.com/money/energy-bills-price-halving-pay
Well that’s a ridiculous statement but it doesn’t change the fact that gas is the most expensive bid every 5min and sets the price for the whole market and its independent of the price of the gas itself.
Same nonsense as me? Perhaps you can explain why my explanation of how the market price is set, is wrong.
The bosses of the energy companies have no incentive to lie. But the owners of wind and solar farms do have an incentive to lie. They are terrified of losing their guaranteed subsidies. They know how useless wind and solar power are and so do the bosses of the energy companies. The energy companies are forced to take the output of wind and solar farms and they are very aware of how this raises the price of electricity.
I’ve described how the price is calculated, it’s very well known and if you were genuinely interested, you could check it yourself. Better still, watch the video i linked above for the method which is the same as Australia.
Politicians are generally ignorant of practical details like that, so I’m not surprised they needed to be told.
But your belief is based on vibes, not facts.
Let us say that she is right, wars in far away places are responsible for higher energy costs in Britain. Then it is reasonable to develop your own resources so the far away wars have little effect. Not doing that would be stupid.
She is a fossil fool herself.
“The reason why our energy bills are much higher than in other countries is because those costs are being driven by global fossil fuel markets”
I once came across a YouTube video which made the amusing point that – if you were to go by global warming “reporting” – everywhere was warming faster than everywhere else.
Miatta’s thesis seems similar: “world prices have gone up, therefore our prices have gone up much more than every other nation in the world”.
How corrupt must a government be for a top minister to say something so ridiculous?
Well, if (necessary) costs of generation have risen by £805 million while charges to consumers have risen by £8,003 million, the answer might be 90% corrupt.
“The reason why our energy bills are much higher than in other countries is because those costs are being driven by global fossil fuel markets”
That is so blatantly illogical by itself that it’s a pity you had to dignify it with data based refutation.