Net Zero Blamed as British Factories Pay Nearly Twice as Much as France for Electricity
Net Zero has been blamed for British businesses having to pay nearly double the price of electricity than their French counterparts, with the main factor being the “UK’s reliance on a combination of expensive renewables and a gas backstop”. The Telegraph has the story.
UK factories, data centres and office blocks are paying 81% more for electricity than companies in France, according to analysis published on Sunday by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a think tank.
This has left Britain at a “significant competitive disadvantage” compared with its Continental neighbour.
Over the past 25 years, the cost of electricity used in manufacturing has risen in both Britain and France, but the UK price has surged further and faster since 2021, the ASI study found.
The ASI said the “most important” factor for the disparity was the “UK’s reliance on a combination of expensive renewables and a gas backstop”.
“France, by contrast, enjoys reliable, low-carbon electricity from nuclear power plants that were relatively affordable to build at the time,” it said.
As an example, Mitchell Palmer, an ASI economist, said a large UK data centre might pay £167 million for 657 gigawatt hours of electricity a year, versus just £92 million in France.
Palmer said a key factor in the growing disparity between the two countries was also Britain’s declining nuclear power output. …
The chemicals industry is one of the most energy-intensive sectors and also one of the hardest hit by energy prices.
Stephen Elliott, from the Chemical Industries Association, said: “We’ve seen a 40% fall in output across our industry between 2021 and 2024 alone and this will get worse when last year’s data is added.
“The closure list is across the country and given where these assets were, I’d be very worried if I was a Labour MP.”
Worth reading in full.
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I wonder if the population is starting to wake up to the whole climate scam? It must be hard as they fight their cognitive dissonance.
I guess the majority live in a little information bubble of BBC, Channel 4, Sky and whatever the government says. Nothing there to challenge the “settled” view on anything.
Or are just plain thick.
Bit late for waking up. Cheaper to stay under the quilt, now.
But our electricity is nice and kind, and drives on the left.
This is a condemnation not just of the current climate scam, but of all of the CND lunatics and the people who allowed themselves to be deterred from doing the best for our country by pandering to the likes of Foot, Kinnock, Huddleston and all of the other fellow travellers of the seventies, eighties and nineties. Oh, it’s too expensive, they said (not now according to France), it’s too dangerous, what will you do with the waste, etc etc. So our once great nuclear industry withered and died on the vine. One hilarious reflection, though, the proposal was to store the small amount of nuclear waste and bi-product in old mines and caves until it was no longer a threat. Ooh, you can’t do that said people like Milibrain’s mother, an earthquake or similar might rupture it. Fast forward forty years and Milibrain is planning a network of high pressure pipes to shift lethal quantities of CO2, unconcerned by the risks that CND raised all those years ago.
Britain led the world in nuclear energy. One of the jobs I was offered on graduation was with the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Winfrith, Dorset, where they had a huge campus-like spread, with two reactors, and from where Britain stunned the world building the world’s first domestic nuclear power plant at Calder Hall.
The Left’s mania, coupled with the destruction of the grammar schools, and hence any serious science teaching, means that we now go cap in hand to the French or Chinese for something we taught them how to do.
I believe Calder Hall was built quicker than the planning for Hinckley.
Yes, it’s amazing to me how many people still believe that the disposal of nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem.
Recent article in the Times bemoaned the fact that “gas prices are 60% higher & electricity 70% higher than February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine“.
The Times nowhere mentions that up to that date, we had 40 years of reliable affordable Russian energy supply, powering our homes and industry, and never once leveraged against us politically, even during the USSR days.
Somehow the Russian “invasion” magically coincided with an inexplicable once in a thousand years rise in our energy prices.
NO MENTION anywhere in our media that before Russia even crossed the border, the US-led NATO countries had already set up & agreed to “the sanctions from hell”, to “destroy Russia’s economy” as I recall Liz Truss saying so smugly at the time.
Well whose economies are under irreversible destruction now Liz? Little Miss Clever Clogs? Irreversible because no-one has the guts to challenge the omerta silence over the major cause of our self-inflicted suicidal sanctions policy, while Russia is doing just fine, despite all the lies and propaganda pumped out by the western media.
The Empire of Lies (as the Russians now call us) is being strangled by its own petard.
Kind of underlies the fact that foreign policy think tanks ain’t what they used to be. Nowadays stuffed full of useless liberal arts graduates who still think as they did in the Student’s Union… 🤦♂️
2010, domestic gas 5p per kWh; electricity 12.5p per kWh.
2026, domestic gas 6p per kWh; electricity 27p per kWh.
If Russia/Ukraine caused such a surge in gas prices, why did it only affect electricity and not gas? Odd that.
And… since gas returned to pre-conflict prices within 12 months, why didn’t electricity prices fall instead of increasing?
That’s odd too.
STOP SPECULATING. AND STOP ASKING QUESTIONS.
😉
This last weekend, I went through a bunch of old documents that we’ve saved for reasons unknown. In the box was a bill for Electricity and Gas for our current home, but dated 2007. For the quarter, it was for the princely sum of £43.71. Our last quarter in 2025 was £550. I am writing a letter of complaint about these damned Russians.
And gas prices were already rising before the Special Operation began in February 2022 as the World awoke from Covid to find there was a shortage of gas production.
Still plugging the lie that gas back up is expensive when it is subject to a Net Zero carbon tax. Looks like the electricity standing charge will rise again in April when announced on Wednesday showing the huge cost of adding unreliable remote generation to the grid. Balancing costs are ten times what they were before this lunacy started.
It is DELIBERATE. —–The whole idea is to have the wealthy western countries make do with LESS of everything and that all starts with ENERGY. But before anyone says “But France is a wealthy western country” you need to know that they do indeed get a large chunk of their electricity from Nuclear, but funding issues for new plants means new ones are uncertain.
However comparing us to France is not he best example. The USA has electricity prices 4 times less than us. It is the countries like the UK and Germany who have decided to go down the absurd pretend to save the planet route of wind (and sun) that have the highest prices as they bend over backwards to align with the Global Governance and Sustainable Development goals of the UN and WEF, which states we in the wealthy west are using too many resources, and hit us with the climate change excuse for not doing that anymore. ——And ofcourse our own political class of Miliband’s are only too happy to oblige with this eco socialist agenda that sees us now with the highest Industrial Electricity Prices in the world and the third highest domestic prices.