Counting the cost of energy production

Henry Rummins

08 July 2011

Among my friends I have a bit of a reputation for being careful with my money.

Haggling over restaurant bills; sticking with a mobile phone the size of a brick; wearing the same wardrobe as 10 years ago - all have provoked exasperated eye-rolling at one time or another.

So reading about the recent price hikes in energy from one of the big energy companies - British Gas - made me wince.

Yet the contrast with other countries couldn't be starker - especially Germany.

German power prices are actually lower now than they were in 2008, and part of this comes down to their massive investment in clean, green forms of energy.

Germany is already a leader in Europe - incredibly, around half of all the solar power in the world is installed there (European investment in green energy as a whole is not growing at the same rate as other parts of the world.)

A big slice of this was on people's homes or in their communities, reducing a reliance on big energy companies for power and making it much harder for companies to hike prices to the eye-watering extent we've seen here.

The German Parliament recently voted overwhelmingly to shut-down eight nuclear reactors immediately. The rest will be shut by 2022. Although some people say the switch-off is a knee-jerk reaction to Japan's Fukushima disaster, in fact it makes sense for the country's wallet, too - stimulating more investment in renewable energy and bringing the price of the technology down even more.

It's reading these kinds of figures which makes me gnash my teeth at the slow progress we're making here in the UK. If we invested in renewable power now, along with cutting the amount of energy we waste, bills will be lower in the future than they otherwise would be if we relied on fossil fuels.

So for the sake of my pearly whites I'm hoping our Government will get a move on with shifting the UK into the same league - please join with us to make it happen.

Henry Rummins, Communications & Media Team

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