British energy firms fear collapse as Europe’s gas crisis sees prices surge 250%

Published

4 years ago

September 20, 2021

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Aman Sharma | Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s energy industry could be headed for a significant shakeup, industry insiders have warned, as countries all over Europe grapple with an unprecedented crisis in the power sector.

Wholesale gas prices have spiked across the region, with the U.K. being hit particularly hard.

The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark for natural gas trading, gained on Monday to trade at 73.150 euros ($85.69) per megawatt-hour, hovering close to the record high seen last week.

Since January, the contract has risen more than 250%.

In the U.K., day-ahead energy prices for Monday reached an average of 291.18 euros per megawatt-hour, according to energy analysis firm LCP Enact. However, the maximum price for the U.K. on Monday could be as high as 1,083.78 euros per megawatt-hour, LCP Enact’s analysis showed.

Impact for energy firms

Robert Buckley, head of relationships and development at Cornwall Insight, told CNBC that the crisis was being caused by a “cocktail of pretty potent things” that were outside of suppliers’ control.

These included strong competition for natural gas deliveries between Europe and Asia, some outages at U.S. production facilities and a tightening of EU carbon market rules, as well as various other factors.

“All suppliers will be finding it very tough at the moment,” Buckley said. “Some of them are bigger and more resilient than others. But scale doesn’t equal automatically resilience.”

He added that “it looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better” in terms of suppliers leaving the British electricity and gas market.

“[Suppliers are] caught between this rapture of the rising energy price wholesale market and the default tariff cap, and depending on who you who you believe, this is anywhere up to £200, £250 below what a market related cost would be at the moment, so that’s 20% of the total bill,” he said, referring to a cap on consumer energy prices in Britain. “That’s -20% of gross margins. Very few [companies] can sustain that for any length of time.”

Meanwhile, Bill Bullen, founder of U.K. supplier Utilita Energy, warned that surging wholesale prices would inevitably lead to more insolvencies in the energy sector.

“We’re heading back to an oligopoly at this rate and going backwards,” he said in an email Monday.

According to a report from Cornwall Insight, in the fourth quarter of 2010, the six largest energy firms supplied 99.5% of the domestic energy market in the U.K. By the second quarter of 2021, that figure had fallen to 69.1%.

“I wonder how it will look at the end of Q3 2021,” Bullen said.

Start-up Bulb, the country’s sixth-largest supplier, is seeking a bailout, while four smaller competitors recently ceased trading, the BBC reported.

According to industry body OGUK, wholesale energy prices have surged with a 70% rise since August alone. “OGUK predicts that UK North Sea output will roughly halve by 2027 unless new fields are opened, making the U.K. even more reliant on imports,” Will Webster, the organization’s energy policy manager, told CNBC via email.

A spokesperson for British energy regulator Ofgem told CNBC in an emailed statement. “This is a global issue … Ofgem is working closely with government to manage the wider implications of the global gas price increase.”

Political fallout

Governments are keen to take action to stop the crisis hitting consumers too hard.

The British government is considering bailout loans for energy suppliers, according to local media reports. Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng met with British energy companies on Monday, in what he said was an effort to “ensure that any energy supplier failures cause the least amount of disruption for consumers.”

Seeking to reassure the public on Sunday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the pricing crisis as “temporary,” Bloomberg reported.

The U.K. has limits on how much suppliers are able to charge consumers for energy, with price caps reviewed by the government every six months.

In a note on Monday, Eurasia Group warned the continent’s soaring energy prices were also beginning to have political ramifications across the wider region.

Spain’s government released a decree this week to cap retail energy prices. Eurasia analysts speculated that if more EU member states imitate Spain, prioritizing cheap energy above the green transition, the EU’s credibility as a climate leader could be damaged.

“If Madrid’s actions find imitators across the EU this winter, the bloc’s efforts to push for more ambitious climate action at the upcoming global talks in November may suffer,” they said in Monday’s note.

Environment

Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]

Published

2 hours ago

July 3, 2025

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Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]

electrek formula sun grand prix solar car track event race

Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!

In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.

Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.

Stay tuned for more!

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Tesla sold 5,000 Cybertrucks Q2, Optimus is in chaos, plus: the Infinity Train!

Published

4 hours ago

July 3, 2025

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Tesla sold 5,000 Cybertrucks Q2, Optimus is in chaos, plus: the Infinity Train!

The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!

We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.

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New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.

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Tesla launches Oasis Supercharger with solar farm and off-grid batteries

Published

5 hours ago

July 3, 2025

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Tesla launches Oasis Supercharger with solar farm and off-grid batteries

Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.

Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.

While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.

Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:

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All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.

Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.

Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.

Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:

The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.

The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.

It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.

With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.

Electrek’s Take

This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.

Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.

The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.

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