UPDATE: Action For Renewables have uploaded their “de-bunking” of Panorama here
In BBC1’s Panorama last week (What’s Fuelling Your Energy Bill?) enviro-skeptic Tom Heap painted the picture that the move to renewable energy sources is to blame for spiraling home energy fuel bills.
There is some truth here, even OFGEM figures support that renewable energy is adding to fuel bills. However the conventional wisdom (now accepted by all the worlds leading scientists) is that not only are fossil fuels damaging the environment, but that increasingly they are imported from political “hot zones” and may even be running out. Therefore, in the medium to long term, energy from conventional sources is set to rise at a much faster pace – eventually making renewable energy prices competitive and perhaps even cheap.
Only this year the International Energy Agency admitted, after years of denial, that peak oil has probably already occurred and therefore it is hard to understand how, as predicted by Mr Helm that oil and gas prices are set to fall. Indeed Mr Helm provided no evidence for this brave assertion nor was he cross examined by the presenter.
Worse still is that in a recent article for the Guardian Mr Helm claimed:
There is enough oil and gas (and coal too) to fry the planet several times over. The problem is there may be too much fossil fuel, not too little, and that fossil fuel prices might be too low, not too high.
The truth is, that with record high prices anyone with large gas and oil reserves will be pumping as fast as they possibly can. Aside from environmentally disastrous shale oil there have been no “mega fields” discovered since the 1950’s and 60’s. Even if this wasn’t the case – just look at where the oil and gas is being exported from. Should the UK be beholden to the likes of Russia and Suadi Arabia?
So the rather biased message in Panorama was this – renewable energy is pushing up your fuel bills while we should be “dashing for gas” because some (un-named) miracle is about to return gas prices to much lower levels.