OFGEM’s Brearley Lies About Renewables

By Paul Homewood

h/t Hugh Sharman

 

There was a time when OFGEM prime consideration was the customer!

 

 

Ofgem Chief Executive Jonathan Brearley’s speech to the Future of Utilities conference delivered on Wednesday 11 June 2025:

Thanks very much and just to say it’s lovely to be here. I am one of those people who have come back to this conference – in fact, I remember the time I came here as CEO in September 2021.

For anyone who has been watching energy over the last few years, that is the very start of the gas crisis that we have been going through.

At the time, as a regulator, we were focused principally on making sure customers were protected as we saw all that turbulence in the retail sector.

And I stood here and I talked about the set of reforms we needed to make to the retail sector, to manage those risks better in the future.

And look, I am really proud to stand here today to say that the industry has emerged from that crisis.

Though we have seen dramatic changes in the way the market operates, and dramatic changes in the prices customers face, we have all worked really hard to protect customers as best we can. And, genuinely, those reforms which I laid out are on their way to being fully implemented and we do see a much more stable retail market – accepting that there is a long way to go to get to a perfect regulatory model, and indeed a perfect operational model, for the UK energy retail market for the future.

So I’m very proud of that. But equally, during the crisis, I spoke to a number of customers about how they felt. Now at times, publicly I was announcing price rises that could have gone up to £3,500 to £4,000. And even though the government put in around £50 billion of support, we still saw customers’ bills double.

And I spoke to many people who talked about their experience of how that felt for them. I talked to people who would rather be in hospital than at home, because hospital was warm. I spoke to people who honestly were making choices between their food, their children’s food and the warmth they needed for their home.

So I don’t want us to forget where we’ve come from. The truth is I’m very proud of the work we’ve done but there is one underlying reason why we were in that situation, and that is this country’s reliance on an international gas market that we simply don’t control.

Ofgem doesn’t control it, the British government, doesn’t control it – indeed the European Union doesn’t control that market.

When I stand here today, what I really want to talk about is how we move to make that change away from the dependency we have on gas today.

Under the vision that Ed Miliband has set out to get to 2030, the principle benefit we see is that we will get to a more stable energy system for customers, and avoid the sorts of price spikes that we’ve seen in the past.

And this year is vital. This year is the year we move from all those plans, all those conversations, all those seminars, all those reports, to investment and action on the ground.

So I was really pleased to see the announcement around Sizewell yesterday. Clearly nuclear will be a big part of our future energy infrastructure. But there is a lot more that we need to do. 

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/jonathan-brearley-speech-future-utilities-conference

You bare faced liar, Brearley!

The so-called gas crisis was very short lived, and we came out of it two years ago because of market factors, not your intervention.

In reality the costs imposed on electricity prices by the gas spike were chicken feed to the costs we have been incurring, and continue to incur, because of your failure to oppose the ruinous Net Zero agenda.

https://data.spectator.co.uk/energy

Yes, we may have more stable markets in future; but they will stabilise at much higher prices than we should be incurring, if we prioritised the use of gas instead of renewables.