The Climate Emergency

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:22 pm on 20 September 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:22, 20 September 2022

I thank Jenny Rathbone for those important points. Llywydd, if it turns out on Friday that, as we hear, the UK Government intends to pay for the help that it will provide to citizens facing enormous hikes in their energy prices by putting the debt that will be raised to do so back into the hands of those households, then it will not have provided a solution at all. There are better ways—ways being used by other countries—to take some of the unexpected and enormous profits that are being made by energy companies in order to help them to deal with the current crisis. And there is the need, Llywydd, for a fundamental reform of the way in which energy markets operate.

Here in Wales this year, we expect that 56 per cent of all the energy used in Wales will be produced by renewable sources. Now, the sun didn't start charging more this summer and the wind isn't costing any more either, yet, despite the fact that more and more of the energy we consume is being produced by sources where there isn't a global crisis in costs, those bills are going up at the same rate as everything else. This just tells you that the way the energy market is organised simply does not reflect the new realities of energy generation.

The European Union has announced that it will sever the cost of electricity from the most expensive therm of gas bought on the previous day. That's how energy prices are driven—you look at the most expensive therm of gas you had to buy and you price the whole of energy accordingly, whether it relies on gas or on renewable sources. That simply is not a sustainable way of organising these markets and it leads to enormous distortions of the sorts of profits that we will see—the Treasury itself estimating that up to £140 billion-worth of unlooked-for profits will end up in the hands of energy companies over the next two years. Of course there are better ways of dealing with that crisis than making poor families the length and breadth of the United Kingdom pay for the next 20 years for the schemes that the UK Government appears to be bringing forward.