UK Government launches independent electricity review aimed at reducing costs

The UK government has decided to launch an independent review, led by one of Britain's leading energy experts, Professor Dieter Helm, to look at ways of reducing electricity costs and achieve energy savings.

Announced just a few days after the UK's largest energy supplier, British Gas, revealed plans to hike electricity prices by 12.5%, the review will look specifically at how the energy industry, government and regulators can keep power costs as low as possible, while ensuring the UK meets its climate targets.

It will consider the whole electricity supply chain, i.e. generation, transmission, distribution and supply as well as opportunities to reduce costs in each element, taking into account the rollout of smart meters and the role of technologies such as electric vehicles, storage, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Other issues of interest will include energy and carbon pricing, energy efficiency, distributed generation, regulation of the networks and innovation and research and development, however, it will not propose detailed tax changes.

Professor Helm said: "The cost of energy always matters to households and companies and especially now in these exceptional times, with huge investment requirements to meet the decarbonisation and security challenges ahead over the next decade and beyond.

"Digitalisation, electric transport and smart and decentralised systems offer great opportunities. It is imperative to do all this efficiently, to minimise the burdens. Making people and companies pay excessively for policy and market inefficiencies risks undermining the objectives themselves.

"My review will be independent and sort out the facts from the myths about the cost of energy and make recommendations about how to more effectively achieve the overall objectives."

Achieving energy savings by making buildings more energy efficient

Improving your building's energy efficiency is a sure fire way to cut electricity costs, and this is specifically where HeatingSave — the low-cost building management system (BMS) — can help.

Replacing your central heating clock with a HeatingSave energy and boiler management controller is the quickest way of beating those tariff rises and saving on energy costs, often paying for itself in less than a year but almost always in less than 3 years.

HeatingSave can cut your energy usage by 20% to 30% with its energy management control, as its internal microprocessor constantly calculates and improves the efficiency and savings of your central heating system.

Using HeatingSave, simply choose the room temperature and the hot water you want, and when, and HeatingSave does the rest. It works with all central heating systems — electricity, oil, gas or coal — and links up with a PC to produce reports and graphs to fashion a powerful and complete energy management system.

The system is backed by the Carbon Trust and the Energy Savings Trust.