Households face this winter? well, to find out, i sat down with the big boss of vaasaett. it monitors the cost of energy bills for every european country, including here in the uk. and their numbers are trusted as the official ones for the industry, and are used when countries put together their energy policy. philip lewis, a real pleasure having you on the show. and philip, let me start with this, because i m just wondering, how extraordinary was the situation that we were looking at last year for european households? absolutely unprecedented. if you look at the amount of price rises, we saw countries typically across europe on average increasing by, or doubling, or in some cases, tripling their prices for energy. that compares, if you put it into context with historical levels, that s about as much of an increase as we saw in total for those countries over the past two decades. and i m wondering, philip, how has the strategy for europe changed? because when i was looking at the r
Pressure on the system. what about energy bills here in the uk? because as a consumer, i mean, they re awfully high, yes? well, the measures that have been put in place by the regulator, the price cap, have, of course, brought the prices down from what they probably would have been otherwise, quite substantially so. but the prices are still, in a european context, they re still very high. britain still has some of the highest energy bills across europe. so, why here in the uk? because the uk is more exposed to those international prices, to some extent, it also has. just the general markets, the energy markets? yes, and there are also some other markets where the protection measures are even stronger, of course, the support that is being given is even larger. and so, therefore. but it s notjust britain, it s also ireland, it s also the netherlands, it s this this region within europe that actually has relatively high prices at the moment. and philip, let me end on this it might be a
Than they were a year ago. and those high prices that we had actually led to lower demand. there was a lot of demand that was reduced by people, by industry because of those high prices. if we lower the prices, even though they re still high, we will have more demand and more to support. all right. it s like a dog chasing its tail. it is, it is. we ve turned off the lights or we ve had less heating on because of the prices those prices come down, we re like, leave the light on, turn the heat up. exactly. i mean, in a sense, we ve been having people say for four decades that energy is too cheap not consumers, consumers are not saying that but generally speaking, energy has been too cheap for people to really care about the cost of energy on a national basis, in most cases. when the price was very high, industry was turning off, households were turning off not always in a good way, but that actually did lead to less
And, of course, while i ve got you, i ve got to ask you the question what is your forecast, the prediction for energy bills this winter? our prediction for the future would be that the prices will stabilise where they are now, which are heavily elevated prices. they could go down, but we re predicting that they probably are more likely to increase than decrease in the short to medium, or longer term especially. and does that vary across the region, if you will? it does. it does vary a lot, with the more expensive countries being, for example, the netherlands, great britain, ireland, italy, some of the baltic countries, as well. at the lower end. meaning it ll be more expensive sorry, is that what you re saying? yes, yes, yes. why more expensive in those countries? because those countries are have in a way, they have more free pricing, despite the fact that they have measures in place. but they generally have more free
Across europe, more than half a trillion dollars was spent in the last year protecting people from the high cost of energy. as the colder months come down the pipeline, and the war in ukraine shows no signs of stopping, is there still an energy crisis for europe and america? how much has changed in the market? and will governments have to spend billions again to protect us from massive bills? billions again to protect i ll going to be discussing all of that with these two the united states government on energy strategy. plus, it s a year since president biden announced hundreds of billions of dollars for the push to clean energy. just months later, europe followed suit. so i ll talk to the boss of one of europe s biggest clean energy companies, fortum, about the money flooding into the market, what happens when moscow seizes your assets, and what it all means for business, bills, and the future of the planet? wherever you rejoining me from around the world, once again, a big hello an