Energy – a season of ill-will

By Richard North - December 24, 2025

Although we’ve not yet had any seriously cold weather, the onset of winter brings on the dampness and seasonal chills, with no option but to turn the heating on if one wants to stay safe and healthy.

With that, of course, comes the time-bomb of higher energy bills which for many households are driving them into penury and creating a debt crisis which can only get worse.

Total household energy debt in Great Britain has hit record highs, reaching £4.4 billion by mid-2025 (up £750 million from the same period in 2024), according to Ofgem and reports from groups like the End Fuel Poverty Coalition.

This debt crisis affects millions. Citizens Advice data suggest that nearly seven million people live in households owing money to suppliers, with average arrears around £1,600–£1,700 per affected account.

Over two million accounts are in debt with no repayment plan in place. In an attempt to reduce the burden on energy suppliers (but not hard-pressed bill payers) Ofgem is allowing them to recover part of their bad debt by a levy on existing bills (adding £100–£150/year per household in some estimates).

The current Ofgem price cap (Oct–Dec 2025) sits at £1,755 for a typical dual-fuel direct debit household – still 50–60 percent above pre-2021 levels, despite wholesale gas prices having fallen well below the peaks of 2021-22.

Not content with that, Ofgem is permitting the cap to edge up slightly to £1,758 from January 2026 (a 0.2 percent rise, or about 28p/month extra for the average household).

Gas unit rates are set to fall back slightly, but electricity and standing charges push it higher overall, the charges rising to cover soaring costs of grid upgrades for decarbonisation, and funding government energy support schemes like the Warm Home Discount, recouping losses from failed energy suppliers during the crisis.

In the expectation of winter usage spiking and more people struggling with bills, Ofgem has belatedly acknowledged the crisis and come up with plans for a Debt Relief Scheme, potentially writing off up to £500 million in historic arrears starting early 2026.

The regulator is also planning and reforms to how debt is handled, but the response has been slammed by the Commons energy security committee, calling it “completely inadequate”, complaining that it is “not tough on debt and does not begin to address the causes of that debt”.

The committee suggested that the industry used windfall profits, resulting from high energy prices following Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine in the early 2020s. Only this, they said, would address the levels of consumer debt that arose in the same circumstances and which continue to force more households to choose between heating and eating. It then criticised Ofgem for failing to engage with this suggestion.

Despite this, Tom Glover (pictured), the head of RWE UK – one of Britain’s largest green power generators – whose salary is so obscenely large that his employers choose to keep it confidential – believe that we should bear this costs with a song in our hearts and cheerful smiles in anticipation of wondrous long-term benefits of decarbonisation.

This joyful yuletide news comes to us via The Times which has the egregious Glover urging ministers not to back down from their ambitious proposals to decarbonise Britain’s power grid by investing billions of pounds in offshore wind, suggesting that the long-term benefits would more than offset the short-term costs.

The detail actually comes from an interview with the magazine Utility Week, where the plump Mr Glover says that his employer recognises the need for “stable and predictable electricity prices” in order to ensure “good industry and affordability for consumers”, but he still thinks that policy makers shouldn’t ignore decarbonisation and security of supply.

“We still need to make sure we’ve got a secure energy system and make sure we’ve got a decarbonised energy system”, he says. “At the moment, understandably given the pressures, there’s a lot of focus on one corner of that trilemma, which is affordability. And while we understand there’s probably a need to lean into that, we should never forget about security and decarbonisation as well”.

Imbued with his own brand of industry bullshit, he adds: “This pressure on affordability, which we understand and is maybe more focused on short-term affordability, isn’t really thinking long term because it’s very clear in the long term that things like offshore wind are part of an affordable energy transition.”

Affordability is, of course, a chimera. The industry pours out bogus statistics claiming that offshore wind is “often” cheaper to build than gas plants but these claims are based on speculative turbine longevity of 30-35 years ignoring real-world conditions, where high-tech, complex machines are being placed in some of the most aggressive environments on the planet.

Furthermore, come 2030, the industry will have to embark on a progressive rebuilding programme so that, by 2050, every single windfarm then standing will have to be replaced.

Operators are trying to cut costs of this repowering programme, by using existing foundations for new turbines, but there are significant structural and engineering challenges to this approach.

The main problem (of many) is that modern turbines (often 12–20 MW rated, with rotor diameters greater than 200 metres and nacelle weights far exceeding early models) impose much higher loads – greater overturning moments, dynamic fatigue, and thrust – than the smaller turbines (typically 2–6 MW) for which early foundations were designed.

There are limited workarounds which either add to the cost or reduce rated capacities, eroding the financial viability of these schemes, while supply chain bottlenecks, installation vessel shortages, inflation and high interest rates, are adding to industry uncertainties.

Earlier in the year, the self-same Glover was telling the BBC that even a very small change in interest rates could have dramatic effects on how much renewable infrastructure is built and how much the power from it costs.

This concern was echoed by Stephen Woodhouse, an economist with the consultancy firm AFRY, which has studied the impact of regional pricing for the power companies – which is one of the elements being considered to increase the viability of the industry. “Those additional costs could quickly overwhelm any of the benefits of regional pricing”, he says.

That, we are told, would come as already high interest rates have combined with rising prices for steel and other materials to push up the cost of renewables. Plans for the massive Hornsea 4 wind farm off the coast of Yorkshire were cancelled in May because the developer said it no longer made economic sense.

Added to this are the costs of modifying the UK electricity distribution network to accommodate renewable electricity generation – estimated at £100-240 billion by 2050 – constraint costs which are currently costing £1.7 billion a year and expected to rise to about £8 billion a year by 2030, and balancing costs of £8 billion a year and rising.

And this doesn’t take into account the massive increase in costs associated with carbon capture and storage, which are nothing short of prohibitive.

In essence, the tone-deaf Glover is basically having a Marie-Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment, which has Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, grasping the political gift with both hands, declaring that one of the country’s largest wind developers telling us that cutting emissions is a bigger priority than cutting bills would “stick in the craw of every family looking at their energy bill this winter”.

“Thanks to Ed Miliband’s net zero targets”, she says, “wind developers will be paid sky-high, inflation-linked prices on fixed contracts for two decades — with the money taken straight from our energy bills”.

An embarrassed RWE could only say that Glover had made clear in his article that he “fully understands the need to focus on affordability, while reminding that there are also two other parts of the energy trilemma – energy security and decarbonisation – to consider longer term”.

The company, however, could not resist injecting it propaganda, though, adding that investment into offshore wind for the future was part of a low-cost energy system for the future that would make power more affordable for consumers.

Come the revolution, when the tumbrels do their rounds, the energy bosses will be amongst their first passengers.