British industry pays some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world. You can believe every word about the climate and still notice that most of the gap isn't physics. It's design.
Crossbencher · 19 July 2026
Cheap energy isn't free, and the honest version 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 doesn't. Anyone arguing about electricity prices who pretends none of that is real isn't 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.
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