You will all be reading about the great gas price spike, fertiliser companies stopping production, and energy companies going bust. A quick THREAD on #GasPrice
First, what's going on? 4 UK nukes are unexpectedly off, we've had one of the least windy summers in 60 years, and the UK's biggest interconnector (to France) caught fire last week. That means scarcity in clean electricity, and more demand for gas power. Events, dear boy!
Meanwhile, higher than anticipated demand in Asia means gas that's shipped in (LNG) isn't coming to the UK, and Gazprom isn't supplying as much gas to Europe as normal, so storage which could buffer bills is low.
Not a good situation, but as Douglas Adams would say, DON'T PANIC!
Not a good situation, but as Douglas Adams would say, DON'T PANIC!
Incidentally all my comms friends are shouting at me that saying DON'T PANIC actually makes people panic. (But really you shouldn't panic about energy or fertiliser.) 
What can we actually do about it? Well, it's hard to fix long-term problems in the short term, and so bills will go up for a bit. But we can make this a blip - if we act now. Here's the 3 point plan for unhooking the UK from fossil fuel volatility:
1: Reinvent retrofit: we can cut our heat demand by ~40% and get 11m homes to net zero by investing in the @EnergiesprongUK approach to retrofits. These homes would use no gas at all. Here's the detail: green-alliance.org.uk/resources/rein…
2: Clean Heat Grants: subsidy for efficiency and heat pumps for the other 16m UK homes, if designed to cut the cost of installation, would be a spectacularly sensible CSR announcement. @ClemCowton just better deliver on her £5,500 retrofit promise!
https://twitter.com/clemcowton/status/1397167872540094464?lang=en-gb
3: get out of (unabated) gas power by 2035: @NationalGridESO and @theCCCuk say we can. Our friends at @EmberClimate summarised how here: ember-climate.org/project/the-uk…
We can start all this right now, and over the next decade, we would stop having to worry about gas competition with east Asia, the influence of Russia over our bills, and also - small thing here - catastrophic climate change! END
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