This is Why Electricity Costs Twice as Much in Britain as in the USA

The peak electricity demand in Britain is in the winter when we need to heat our homes, offices, shops, warehouses, factories etc. But in the winter solar farms produce almost no electricity in Britain. This is because it is dark for around 16 hours a day and when the Sun does appear it is weak and usually hidden behind thick cloud. Solar energy may make sense in some countries, for example the countries of North Africa, but building solar farms in Britain is completely brainless.

The new Energy Secretary Ed Milliband has just given the green light to the biggest solar farm in the U.K. He claims that building the Sunnica solar farm in East Anglia will “cut bills for families”. As is often the case with politicians, the opposite is true. Because solar farms produce almost no electricity in the winter there will need to be back-up electricity generation. So essentially two electricity generation facilities will have to be built and operated, one for the summer and one for the winter. This will increase electricity bills for families not cut them.

Subsidies to companies operating solar farms and wind farms is one of the reasons electricity bills in Britain are already amongst the highest in the world. We pay five times as much for our electricity as China and twice as much as the USA. The pain that these high bills cause British families is of no concern to the small group of eco-zealots in Government and the TV news who peddle scare stories about global warming and tell half-truths about the cost of renewables. They want Britain to be a world leader in Net Zero and don’t care about the price the rest of us have to pay for this utterly pointless ambition. Britain is responsible for only 1% of global CO₂ emissions so even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow it would have no measurable impact on global temperatures.

Household electricity prices worldwide in December 2023, by select country (in U.S. dollars per kilowatt-hour). Source: Statista

Meanwhile the big CO₂ emitters, like China (30% of global CO₂ emissions) and the USA (10% of global CO₂ emissions), move far more slowly towards Net Zero. They continue to build and operate fossil-fuel power stations. Unlike solar farms and wind farms, these power stations are both cheap and reliable, they work every hour of every day summer and winter. This is why the electricity bills for Chinese and American families are so much lower than the bills for British families.

Dr. John Fernley is a retired scientist.