By Paul Homewood
I mentioned EMBER in my post on carbon taxes today, with the Telegraph reporting:
In July, the average cost of power generated by gas-fired plants was £79.24 per megawatt hour. Of this, £25.64 or 32pc was carbon taxes, according to figures published by the think tank Ember.
EMBER, let me stress, is a left wing, pro-renewable think tank, as their website makes clear:
“We’re a global energy think tank that accelerates the clean energy transition with data and policy.”
https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-and-costs/
They have no interest in promoting fossil fuels.
They publish a very useful data tool for electricity pricing across Europe, which is updated daily. You can play around with it here.
The table relevant to the Telegraph article is this:
The data is shown as monthly. In July 2025, the wholesale price (blue line) was £79.24/MWh.
This broadly corresponds with EMBER’s theoretical marginal cost of gas generation, which is split:
- £55.35/MWh for fuel
- £24.87/MWh for carbon costs
The data for this supplied by Montel Analytics, a well respected energy business. Due to licensing, that data cannot be downloaded, but EMBER’s graphs can be hovered over to read it.
Apart from the impact of carbon taxes, what is particularly significant is that fuel costs this year are barely higher than in 2018, in real terms. Prices that year ranged from £22.07 to £50.34/MWh. Most months were around the £40 mark.
In between times, of course, we saw extremely depressed prices during COVID lockdowns as demand plummeted, followed by the Ukraine spike in gas prices in 2021/22.
RPI has risen by 45% since January 2018, so in real terms, gas fuel costs are no higher now than they were for most of that year.
This clearly demolishes the myth that it is high gas prices which are making electricity so expensive.
None of this new or rocket science. The numbers are easy to replicate – simply take the wholesale price of gas and divide by the assumed efficiency of a CCGT plant, say 53%. I have often done the calculation myself.
What makes this EMBER tool so valuable is that it is authoritative and can be simply wheeled out every time the renewable lobby claims that wind power costing £117/MWh is somehow cheaper than gas.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Paul Homewood
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