Ecotricity explains: The energy crisis

The energy crisis is making headlines across Britain. Ecotricity are in strong position, having already bought 90% of our energy for the next year. With over 25 years of energy trading experience under our belts, we know what we’re doing.

Nonetheless, the energy crisis means prices are going up, consumers are worried and many small energy suppliers are in danger of going out of business.

Our founder, Dale Vince, wrote about what’s going on in the Daily Express newspaper and explained why Energy Independence is the way to go for Green Britain:

“We’re having a bit of an energy crisis - you might have noticed.

The immediate crisis started with a shortage of electricity, driven by three things:

• Britain's nuclear fleet is offline unexpectedly after scheduled maintenance.

• And our wind fleet is suffering freak weather - the lowest summer wind speeds across the country for 60 years! More climate disruption?

• And on top of that a fire has taken out one of the half dozen interconnectors that we use to import from Europe. It's a perfect storm.

To make up the shortfall our system looks to use gas power stations. But there are shortages of gas, driven by three things:

• Record demand for LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) in Asia as economies bounce back from the pandemic, pulling supplies away from Europe.

• Reduced supply of gas into Europe from Russia, for some reason… (looks like politics)

• And low levels of storage in Britain, which even in normal times has really low level of storage - just 1% of Europe’s capacity.

And so we have record demand for gas, as gas is in short supply, and the price rockets - taking the price of electricity with it. That’s how markets work of course.

Where we are now shows how dependent we are not just on ‘free markets’, but on global supply chains too, for our energy. While talk right now is focused on how many suppliers go bust and will credit balances be protected - that’s the effect not the cause.

We need to fix the underlying problem, where our energy comes from - not just where in the world but from what actual energy source.

We need to be Energy Independent, making everything we need right here, and we need to do that using renewable energy - the wind and sun for electricity and grass for gas.

We’re launching a new initiative this week that holds the answer to this problem.

If we were Energy Independent using renewables, we’d not only avoid these global shocks in the energy market - we’d save over £1 billion every week from leaving our economy, create hundreds of thousands of good jobs, clean up the air that we breathe - and tackle the climate crisis into the bargain.

As ever, the answer to the climate crisis is actually the answer to so many other man-made problems.”