Cheap energy is not free, and the honest starting point says so. A country that ran on the cheapest available power and asked no questions would be paying elsewhere - in the air its children breathe, in a dependence on regimes it would rather not fund, in a bill posted to a future it has decided not to think about. Decarbonising costs money now to save more later. Energy security has a price that looks like waste right up until the winter it does not. Anyone arguing about electricity prices who pretends none of that is real is not arguing seriously.
Grant all of it. A stubborn fact still stands. British industrial electricity is the most expensive of the twenty-five countries that report to the International Energy Agency - almost half as much again as France, about four times the price in the United States (IEA, 2024). And a large part of that gap owes nothing to the weather, the geology, or the greenness of the grid. It owes to the way the market was built.
The price is set by the last, dearest plant
At the core of it is a design choice most people have never heard of and all of them pay for. In the wholesale market, the price everyone receives is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand in that moment. In Britain, that is a gas plant about eighty-five per cent of the time (IEA, 2024) - even on a day when cheap wind is supplying most of the power. So the cost of gas gets stamped onto electricity that gas did not generate. Now add a grid too slow to connect the cheap generation that already exists, and a planning system that treats a transmission line like an act of vandalism. The result is manufactured expense. Renewables build out, and the bill barely moves, because the rules were written so the dearest unit sets the rate for all of them.
None of this is inevitable. It is a set of decisions - about market structure, grid investment, and what may be built where - and decisions can be revisited. Gas-marginal pricing is a rule, not a law of nature. The grid queue is a queue because nobody made it move. The blocked pylons are blocked by the veto economy, not by the impossibility of pylons.
Wanting the clean thing and the cheap fix at once
There is no contradiction in wanting Britain to decarbonise and being furious that its power costs this much. The second is not mostly caused by the first. The expense is not the price of virtue. It is the price of a market that passes the cost of the worst plant to every customer, a grid that cannot deliver the cheap electricity already being made, and a consenting system that will not let the wires be built. A country can have clean power and cheap power. Britain has chosen, so far, to design its way out of the second while congratulating itself on the first.
An opinion of the house. The argument is ours; the record beneath it belongs to no one.
How this piece was made
How this piece was made. The case for paying more for clean and secure energy is put at full strength and conceded before the turn, so the piece is not an anti-net-zero argument; it accepts the goal and attacks the market design. The load-bearing mechanism - marginal (gas-set) wholesale pricing, grid connection delay, and planning blockages on transmission - is structural and describable without a contested figure. FIGURES CONFIRMED (2026-07-18, IEA 2024) before publication: the comparative price claims (UK industrial electricity relative to France and the US) are confirmed against IEA 2024 data and now stated in the body (highest of 25 IEA countries; about 50 per cent above France; about four times the US; gas-set price about 85 per cent of the time). A critic should test how much of the international price gap is genuinely policy-driven versus structural (gas dependence, island grid), which the piece attributes largely to design and a critic may weight differently.
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