Regions without domestic gas supplies or which have depleted most of their gas reserves in recent decades get a lot of their gas by importing it.

European periphery countries, including the UK and many parts of the Mediterranean, assumed they could rely on global supplies of liquefied natu...

Some of the causes of sky-high energy bills are unavoidable – there is little that most governments can do about the wholesale price of gas itself. Fossil fuel companies make huge investments that take years to mature, breeding periods of moderate prices followed by supply squeez...

Energy markets aren’t designed to cope efficiently with sources like renewables which cost a lot to build but far less than fossil fuels to run. Governments offer long-term, fixed-price contracts to generators for their output of renewable energy. This has been the biggest driver of investment, w...

When there isn’t enough renewable power being generated or stored – like on cold and calm winter days – the green power pool would buy electricity from the wholesale market for limited periods and quantities. To minimise those costs, contracts could give discounts to customers who can use electri...

The last fixed-price government contracts offered for offshore wind energy in Britain – hardly the cheapest of renewables – were under 5p per kilow...

The knock-on effect to energy bills is amplified in the UK and other countries in Europe where electricity is organised through wholesale markets (in which generators bid to operate if the price is right) and in which most homes rely on gas for heating. Average home energy bills in the UK, which ...