By Susanna Twidale<\/p>\n
LONDON, April 16 (Reuters) – Britain’s carbon tax on electricity generation will be scrapped from April 2028, the government said on Thursday as \u200cit seeks to curb electricity prices for households and businesses.<\/p>\n
Domestic energy prices are \u200cexpected to soar from July following wholesale energy prices which have risen due to the Iran conflict \u200band as the regulator’s price cap enters a new pricing quarter from July to September.<\/p>\n
Britain introduced the tax, called the Carbon Price Support, on emissions from power plants in April 2013 as part of its efforts to meet climate targets, by making polluting fossil fuel \u200cpower production, particularly coal, more expensive.<\/p>\n
“The \u2060removal of the Carbon Price Support represents a positive step towards lowering retail electricity prices,” Pranav Menon, Senior Research Associate, Aurora Energy Research, \u2060said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n
The government had frozen the tax at 18 pounds ($24) per metric ton of carbon dioxide until April 2028, in last year’s budget.<\/p>\n
“CPS has done its job \u200band is \u200bno longer fit for purpose. Coal has \u200bbeen driven off the grid,” Dan \u200cTomlinson, exchequer secretary to the treasury, said in a written statement to parliament announcing the change.<\/p>\n
Britain’s last coal-fired power plant closed in 2024 and the government has been ramping up renewable power as it strives to meet a target to largely decarbonise its electricity sector by 2030.<\/p>\n
“With our Clean Power 2030 mission, we are already reducing our \u200celectricity system\u2019s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and we \u200bno longer need this additional tax to provide \u200bincentives in the system to decarbonise \u200bour grid,” Tomlinson said.<\/p>\n
The tax is paid by fossil fuel electricity \u200cgenerators on top of costs under the \u200bcountry’s Emissions Trading System, \u200bwhere benchmark prices currently trade around 49 pounds per ton.<\/p>\n
Analysts at Bernstein said the CPS adds around 7 pounds per megawatt hour to wholesale electricity prices with \u200bthe scrapping of the \u200ctax equating to a cost saving of around 21 pounds per year on \u200ban average household electricity bill.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.7381 pounds)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Susanna Twidale; Editing by \u200bToby Chopra, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Andrew Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Susanna Twidale LONDON, April 16 (Reuters) – Britain’s carbon tax on electricity generation will be scrapped from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,7494,2531,7493,188],"class_list":{"0":"post-15844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-carbon-tax","10":"tag-electricity-generation","11":"tag-electricity-prices","12":"tag-energy-prices"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116419205906147554","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}