The last fixed-price government contracts offered for offshore wind energy in Britain—hardly the cheapest of renewables—were under 5p per kilowatt hour (kWh). That’s less than a quarter of the typical domestic tariff (what most people pay for electricity at home) that consumers are set to face in 2022. Households are paying for their electricity several times what it now costs to generate and transmit it from the cleanest energy sources at scale.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try to minimize costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises. This is not because governments elsewhere use taxes to subsidize electricity (though some do), but because in wholesale electricity markets, the most expensive generator sets the price.

Since renewables and nuclear will always run when they can, it is fossil fuels—and at present, unequivocally gas, plus the cost of taxes on CO₂ pollution—that set the price almost all the time, because some gas plants are needed most of the time, and they won’t operate unless the electricity price is high enough to cover their operating cost. It’s a bit like having to pay the peak-period price for every train journey you take.