Freak weather is also playing its part as droughts in Brazil and Argentina dent electricity output from their hydroelectric plants, forcing both to take up the slack in the gas market.
📈At 164p a therm, gas prices are already around triple the average of the last decade
❓Is the crisis temporary?
Despite the prominent short-term drivers of the current spike, experts say policy decisions have also increased the UK's energy vulnerability.
Andrew Large, chairman of the Energy Intensive Users Group, said the Noughties' "dash for gas" has left the country with few options beyond expensive gas.
🗣️"We've talked for a long time about potential grid instability due to reliance on intermittent renewables"
❓How do we fix it?
In the short-term, experts hope that big producers such as the US and Australia will respond by pumping more gas.
"The question is whether the increase in production capacity can catch up with rising global demand levels," analyst Tim Dixon says
💡Dixon says: "The fundamentals are ensuring that we have enough electrons under all conceivable sets of circumstances in order to be able to keep the lights on at reasonable prices. That therefore means gas storage, it means diversification of supply, it means greater autarky."
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.
🔴President Vladimir Putin told Russians in a televised address that the mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner group was “a stab in the back for our troops and the people of Russia.”
🇷🇺For Vladimir Putin, this is the end of the road.
He may just survive an armed rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries but he will be permanently damaged and his Kremlin days are numbered.