Saving money on energy bills

Melanie Kramers

15 March 2012

When you've already put on three jumpers, it's hard to know what else you can do to save on energy bills. (It's also hard to bend your arms.)

But after a winter of carefully monitoring our heating and hiding under a tartan blanket to watch TV, we've still been landed with a massive gas bill.

So it was worrying to learn yesterday that household fuel bills are likely to rise while our energy suppliers rely on expensive gas that we import from dodgy parts of the world.

Friends of the Earth's new research shows that's because our bills are linked to global gas prices, which energy experts predict are likely to soar as worldwide demand rockets.

I know that better draught-proofing and insulation would help keep the flat warm and cut costs. I'm working on the landlord.

But our best chance of affordable energy in the long run, my campaigner colleagues tell me, is by insulating homes properly and using energy more cleverly - and if suppliers also switch to clean British energy from our waves, wind and sun.

At the moment the Big Six firms who supply 99% of households - like my supplier British Gas - keep us hooked on fossil fuels. Coal and gas, which I'm told make up three quarters of our electricity supply, are not only really dirty but getting more expensive all the time.

I'm fed up with being ripped off over energy. So I'm taking action. And I don't mean no more hot showers.

Instead, I'm signing this petition asking David Cameron to stand up to the Big Six and give us energy we can all afford.

And then I'm going home to check the radiators haven't been left on.

Melanie Kramers, Communications & Media team

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