"It gives you all the information you need"

ARMSA delegates at the latest Managing Safely for Wind Power course held in the North West have been quick to praise the content and delivery of this ground breaking formula which marks a deliberate move away from generic all-industry safety training courses. This totally unique IOSH accredited course, devised by ARMSA Consulting in collaboration with the UK's leading Wind Power Generation companies, is packed with relevant critical information for engineers and management working on and off shore and gets to the heart of the planning and design, construction, operations and maintenance issues which are specific to this sector. At the end of the comprehensive five day session, delegates were asked to provide their opinion on whether the course had changed their approach to health and safety management, what impact it will have on their business performance, which particular part was most beneficial and how this course compares to other health and safety courses available in the market.

Jessica Haywood, RWE NPower, commented "The main way the course will change my operational practices is in the way I carry out risk assessments. We currently use a computerised programme only but I now think that’s slightly limiting. The ARMSA course has taken me through all the critical steps required, making sure I understand and don’t miss anything before I take the information to the computerised system. That has to be beneficial. The course has also taught me that managing safety and change techniques are important and you must understand everyone's point of view to enable successful change. How they perceive things as opposed to how you perceive things can be very different and very interesting."
 
Jessica continues "I've been on other courses - risk awareness and risk assessment - so you would think that I should know how to do risk assessment - but I now realise that the definitions weren’t previously clear to me. Now I've learnt clearer definitions to give me a better understanding of why you do certain processes, helping me to see the whole picture and its impact on the business. When introducing new things into the business it's important to understand how they change the whole business. Definitely this course presents a holistic approach to enable better operational efficiencies."

Marcin Frost, Weir Group says "This course has certainly widened my insight about safety within an organisation and how it affects all managers within all departments. I am now seeing it through their eyes. Going forward, this means our business will have more clarity. Having that knowledge after the course is definitely going to help us."

He continues "This course is completely different to other courses. It's not the typical health and safety course. In fact, this completely changes my opinion to health and safety courses! I used to think they were boring and repetitive and irrelevant to what I'm doing on a daily basis but this course relates exactly to every single issue I come across in daily life. It gives you all the information you need."

Neil Crudgington, REG Windpower told us "Managing Safely for Wind Power has given us a different insight into how to manage safety. I think we previously looked at it very much as a compliance issue whereas this course has really given us a focus. I can see where managing safety can actually benefit through the whole business. This perspective can actually change the way we approach things across the business and we can integrate safety in a more comprehensive way. Interestingly the section focused on the performance side of the business gave us an idea of how to set targets i.e. if you measure something it tends to get better. This course definitely gives you essential and relevant tools so I would say it's been really useful. Safety courses don’t tend to have a good reputation, whereas I've enjoyed it very much."

Grant Henderson, RWE NPower says "This course has certainly re-set my expectations of what is required for my role within the wind power industry and its actually highlighted some deficiencies within our organisation that we have to address. I've done risk assessment before but never to this level and never so in-depth. That's been a really useful tool. Compared to other courses this is far more in-depth and far more packed with real world experiences. The ARMSA model relates the information to real industry experiences. In my opinion, other courses are far too theoretical and the instructors don’t have the same real world knowledge. I would definitely recommend ARMSA Consulting's courses."

Owned by critical business solutions specialist, ARMSA Consulting, Managing Safely for Wind Power has been created with significant financial investment to compile and present a kaleidoscope of fascinating on-the-button market-savvy information not available in any other session anywhere in the world. The touchstone product to enlighten wind power delegates on their capacity to add value to their organisation, the ethos of the course is this: By improving health and safety, not only are workers and corporate reputations protected, but there is also a strategic focus on supporting company effectiveness, returns on investment and operational efficiency.

For more information on how you or your employees can benefit in 2012 from this indispensable five day information source please call ARMSA Khalida Suleymanova on 0844 880 5111.

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Business solutions specialist, ARMSA Consulting, is delighted to announce that the dedicated  Siemens wind power training facility in Newcastle, part of Siemens Energy Service, is investing in  'Managing Safely for Wind Power', ARMSA's acclaimed IOSH accredited course. The touchstone product in terms of critical information and delivery, 'Managing Safely for Wind Power' is the only IOSH accredited course which has been created with over £80k investment and devised in collaboration with the UK's leading Wind Power Generation companies. Regarding health and safety as an intrinsic part of both a person's and an organisation's overall operational efficiency, this unique 5 day course gets to the heart of the planning and design, construction, operations and maintenance issues which are specific to this sector, ensuring participants receive relevant, engaging and essential information which proactively energises and empowers them, providing decisive nuts and bolts tools and techniques which can significantly improve workplace efficiency. Siemens has asked ARMSA Consulting to run 18 of these courses from its Newcastle training facility over an 18 month period so that up to 250 of its senior managers and supervisors can experience  the course benefits. 

Keith Hunter, Head of Training at Siemens, says "Siemens is involved in many exciting new onshore and offshore projects and it's imperative that we deliver exciting customized customer solutions and innovative services to all of our customers. We are impressed with the wealth of market-specific information and the unambiguous delivery of the ARMSA Consulting course and it's clear that the company's forward-thinking ethos fits ours. ARMSA Consulting is building a reputation for challenging the perceptions of risk through vital active learning and we agree with its argument that.

by improving health and safety, not only are workers and corporate reputations protected, but there is also a strategic focus on supporting company effectiveness, returns on investment and operational efficiency.    This course will provide a valuable additional training resource and we really look forward to the roll-out."

Siemens' wind power service teams at its £8m UK training centre, one of four across Siemens globally, provide critical support for hundreds of new and existing projects in the UK, in particular the Crown Estate Round 3 offshore wind power development programme and Scottish Waters. These programmes are targeted to deliver 37 gigawatts (GW) of energy from renewables for the UK over the next two decades which equates to a seven fold expansion from a 2010 capacity of 5 GW. The dedicated training facility includes a fully loaded 2.3 megawatt (MW) nacelle and an offshore 3.6 MW turbine and this level of investment illustrates Siemens' commitment to equip its wind power service technicians with the vital skills required to meet the exacting service needs of the industry today and tomorrow.

For further information on ARMSA Consulting's unique integrated service solutions please call 0844 880 5111.   

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International Atomic Energy Agency team blocked by authorities in Tehran from visiting suspect site

The diplomatic options for a solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis narrowed on Wednesday after a team of UN nuclear inspectors returned from Tehran without agreement on visiting a suspect site.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is due to issue its latest report on the Iranian nuclear programme on Friday, but took the unusual step of criticising Tehran's approach in a statement issued while the inspectors were still flying back to its headquarters in Vienna.

The main stumbling block was Iran's refusal to allow the IAEA team to visit a military site at Parchin, where the last agency report, issued in November, said there was a steel chamber which could have been used for testing explosives of a type performed in the development of a nuclear warhead.

"It is disappointing that Iran did not accept our request to visit Parchin during the first or second meetings," said the agency's director general, Yukiya Amano. "We engaged in a constructive spirit, but no agreement was reached."

Herman Nackaerts, the IAEA deputy director general and head of the safeguards department, who headed the mission, had made a Parchin visit the main litmus test for its success, according to diplomatic sources, but was rebuffed by the Iranians.

Speaking at Vienna airport on his return, Nackaerts said his team "could not find a way forward".

A Vienna-based diplomat briefed on the visit said Iran had sought to focus the talks on a work-plan circumscribing the conduct of IAEA inspections.

"It was very hard work. The Iranians focused exclusively on process and they tried to get the team to sign a document which governed the ways they would work," the diplomat said. "My reading is, what happened was that the meetings were monopolised by a lot of unproductive discussions on the wording of the agreement and practical questions put forward by the agency were put to the side."

The IAEA said: "Intensive efforts were made to reach agreement on a document facilitating the clarification of unresolved issues in connection with Iran's nuclear programme, particularly those relating to possible military dimensions. Unfortunately, agreement was not reached on this document."

In the wake of the collapse of the mission, Friday's report will almost certainly give a negative assessment of Iranian co-operation while noting the progress of the country's nuclear programme and uranium enrichment, which the UN security council has demanded Tehran suspend.

Iran insists it has a right to enrich uranium and the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, put on a show of defiance on Wednesday with a rare meeting with Iranian nuclear scientists, insisting their work was peaceful, that Iran had no intention of building a bomb and vowing the programme would continue in the face of mounting international pressure.

"With God's help, and without paying attention to propaganda, Iran's nuclear course should continue firmly and seriously," Khamenei said on Iranian state television. "Pressures, sanctions and assassinations will bear no fruit. No obstacles can stop Iran's nuclear work."

Doubts have now been cast over tentative plans to hold a new round of talks between Iran and a six-nation group of major powers, including the five permanent members of the UN security council together with Germany. The group, known as the P5+1, had been waiting for the new IAEA report before deciding whether to proceed with the talks.

It was also seeking clarification on whether Iran had dropped its earlier preconditions for negotiations, which included an immediate end to sanctions and a guarantee that uranium enrichment was a non-negotiable Iranian right.

There had been hopes that the P5+1 meeting could agree confidence-building measures, possibly including an exchange of Iranian low enriched uranium for French-made fuel rods. Diplomats said the group would now have to reassess if there would be any purpose in a meeting.

Some western capitals are pushing instead for Iran to be referred to the UN security council by the IAEA board of member states, with the aim of imposing further sanctions. An EU oil embargo is already planned for 1 July, at about the same time of US financial sanctions against the Iranian global oil trade.

The development takes microbial power technology a stage nearer its goal of providing a renewable source of energy

Scientists have doubled the power output of a "bacteria battery" by selecting microbes from a UK river estuary, including one normally found in space.

The development takes microbial power technology a stage nearer its goal of providing a portable, independent and renewable source of power for use with low-energy devices and in parts of the world without electricity.

A multi-disciplinary team from Newcastle university focussed on the river Wear estuary to collect and test different bacteria for their power-generation potential. The microbial power process is well-established in sewage treatment and water cleansing, but remains well short of providing a significant supply of electricity.

The Newcastle survey, reported in the latest issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, shows how a prolonged dredge of just one site can come up with a formidable range of relatively powerful microbes. One of the best, whose presence startled the scientists, was Bacillus stratosphericus which is found in large quantities 30km above the Earth and brought down to the planet by atmospheric cycling.

The survey tested 75 species before combining the best into a Microbial Fuel Cell whose output then rose from 105 watts per cubic meter to 200, or enough to run an electric light.

"The research and findings show the potential power of the technique," said Grant Burgess, professor of marine biotechnology at Newcastle. "What we have done is deliberately manipulate the microbial mix to engineer a biofilm that is more efficient at generating electricity.

"This is the first time individual microbes have been studied and selected in this way. Finding B. stratosphericus was quite a surprise but what it demonstrates is the potential of this technique for the future – there are billions of microbes out there with the potential to generate power.

"We have got used to seeing road signs powered by small solar cells. In the same way, an MFC could potentially be portable and just need immersing in water or sticking in soil for the bacterial process to start."

Selected by Time magazine three years ago as one of contemporary science's 50 most important inventions, microbial power harnesses the glow-worm-like electricity naturally generated by some microbes during their processing of waste water or mud. Commercial versions coat carbon electrodes with a bacterial slime whose tiny organisms convert nutrients into electrons and pass the power into a battery.

The research brings the lead in MFC technology back to the part of the world where it first began. In 1911, Prof M C Potter at Durham university produced electricity from E.coli bacteria in his botany department, a breakthrough little-remarked at the time but followed up from 1930s onwards.

Samples of microbe "pick-and-mix" are likely to follow from an increasing range of places including the deep sea. Prof Burgess's current lecture topics include snotworms, whose ability to decompose the bones of dead whales on the seabed is attracting scientific interest.

Operator of Britain's largest coal-fired power station blames lack of financial help from government for decision which involved £1.4bn investment

Drax, operator of Britain's largest coal-fired power station, is scrapping plans to build two biomass plants in the UK with Germany's Siemens in a fresh blow to the future of renewable energy. The company blamed a lack of financial help from the government for the decision which involved an investment of around £1.4bn.

Dorothy Thompson, the chief executive, said: "We have expressed disappointment with the proposed level of support for this technology, which makes the investment case for the independent [biomass] generators highly challenging.

"The development planned for the Drax power station site has proved the most [problematic] for a number of reasons, including its inland location which increases logistics costs."

Thompson added that given the significant financial liability that "we would face were we to delay our investment decision until we have certainty over the final support level for dedicated biomass, we have decided to cancel the project."

Drax has also shelved plans to build a second plant at another UK site, but is exploring options to develop a biomass facility with Siemens at the port of Immingham on the River Humber. Biomass typically burns wood chippings, agricultural waste and straw pellets, a process that cuts carbon emissions by around 80% compared to coal.

Thompson was more upbeat about prospects for boosting profits and reducing pollution by mixing increasing quantities of biomass with coal, so-called "co-firing," at its huge Drax plant in North Yorkshire. The plant, near Selby, supplies 7% of Britain's electricity.

A £450m development programme to boost "co-firing" is under consideration, but the rate of expansion is also dependent on government financial help. Co-firing currently accounts for 6% of Drax output, but the long-term plan is to take it to over 50% – a move that could eventually make up for the lost megawatts that would have been attributed to biomass, if new plants had come on stream.

Ministers are currently reviewing the financial regime governing the use of renewables to meet the EU target for 15% of energy to come from renewable sources by 2015. Its findings are expected to be published in the spring.

Green campaigners are still reeling from a decision last year by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) to slash solar power subsidies in a move that infuriated the industry, including many small businesses, some of which have gone bankrupt as a direct result of the clampdown. Although the high court has ruled the proposed cuts are illegal, because of botched consultation procedures, the government is drawing up emergency measures to cap the cost of solar panel subsidies.

Analysts says Drax is in a difficult position because its future will be determined by the shape of future regulation decided in Whitehall, while at the same time the level of profit from burning coal for power generation is uncertain from 2013 with the introduction of a minimum price for carbon. But Drax says it can easily replace half its coal-fired capacity with biomass to reduce toxic emissions, if sufficient government help is forthcoming.

The company revealed its financial results for the year to the end of December 2011, with underlying earnings falling 15% to £334m due largely to higher commodity prices. But pre-tax profits rose from £255m to £338m, thanks to a one-off tax credit and gains from hedging activities. The company cut the total dividend from 32p to 28p.

Thompson said: "We continue to operate at less than our installed renewable biomass capacity because of the current low level of regulatory support. However, the results of our biomass combustion trials give us full confidence in our technical capability to become predominantly biomass fuelled."

Liberum Capital analyst Dominic Nash said: "Drax has provided more clarity on its biomass trials and capital expenditure. This is significant in our view as it indicates that co-firing above 50% is a possibility … and could be an important value-driver later in the decade."

Prime minister writes to 100 Conservative backbenchers who complained about wind farm subsidies and planning rules

• Norman Baker: We must capitalise on a low-carbon future

The prime minister has mounted a strong defence of the government's plans to build huge wind farms around the country in the face of strong opposition from his own members of parliament.

David Cameron has written to more than 100 of his own backbenchers who published an open letter to the PM asking for subsidies for "inefficient" on-shore wind power to be slashed, and complaining about planning policies putting national energy policies ahead of local objections.

In his reply, addressed to Chris Heaton-Harris, the Tory MP who organised the original letter, Cameron says he has sympathy with local residents' concerns, but insists there are "perfectly hard-headed reasons" for building more on-shore wind farms – regardless of the UK's commitments to meet targets for renewable energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"On-shore wind plays a role in a balanced UK electricity mix, alongside gas, nuclear, cleaner coal and other forms of renewable energy," said the prime minister. "A portfolio of different supplies enhances energy security and prevents the UK from becoming over-reliant on gas imports."

In a nod to the growing pressure on the government to do more to stimulate the economy and in particular meet ambitious promises to create thousands more "green jobs", Cameron added: "I am also determined that we seize the economic opportunities in renewable energy supply chains as the global race for capital in low-carbon sectors intensifies."

The PM also repeated the government's existing policy of cutting subsidies to on-shore wind by 10% in the near future in recognition that the building cost had fallen.

The letter will offer some reassurance to the renewable energy industry, but is likely to disappoint MPs who signed the original letter, including some senior party figures such as the former party chairman and leadership challenger David Davis, and Nicholas Soames.

In return Heaton-Harris, who believes he has enough cross-party support – including at least 10 Labour MPs – to form an all-party group to keep the issue alive, said they would request a meeting with the PM to press for further concessions.

"I obviously didn't expect the prime minister to just say: 'OK, you are right,' and change policy in this area and I am pleased he understands the massive concern that local residents have about these plans," Heaton-Harris told the Guardian.

"However, those who signed the letter would like to see a cut in subsidy to on-shore wind greater than the 10% proposed, and hope that our suggested amendments to the national planning policy framework are taken on board. We are also concerned at how the cost of this type of renewable energy is adding to fuel poverty."

The prime minister's letter also said that new government planning laws were intended to give residents more say in combating unpopular planning proposals in their areas, while the Department of Energy and Climate Change has put forward a scheme under which local communities could take a financial stake in new renewable energy and claim some of the profits.

The energy expert and physicist describes his vision of how the world can attain a green energy future by 2050

Amory B. Lovins is fond of referring to the Rocky Mountain Institute, where he serves as chairman and chief scientist, as a "think and do" tank, and it's clear that to Lovins the doing is every bit as important as the thinking. Hardly lacking in confidence or ambition, Lovins — in conjunction with his colleagues at the institute — has published Reinventing Fire, his step-by-step blueprint for how to transition to a renewable energy economy by mid-century.

Impressive in both its scope and detail — Lovins discusses everything from how to redesign heavy trucks to make them more fuel efficient to ways to change factory pipes to conserve energy — the book lays out a plan for the U.S. to achieve the following by 2050: cars completely powered by hydrogen fuel cells, electricity, and biofuels; 84 percent of trucks and airplanes running on biomass fuels; 80 percent of the nation's electricity produced by renewable power; $5 trillion in savings; and an economy that has grown by 158 percent.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Lovins discusses how business and society can pull off this transformation even if the U.S. Congress keeps failing to act, why climate change need not even enter the discussion, and why the oil industry will ultimately forego fossil fuels and jump aboard the green bandwagon. "One system is dying and others are struggling to be born," says Lovins. "It's a very exciting time."

Yale Environment 360: Given that we're in the midst of what could only be described as a fossil fuel boom, with the discovery of new unconventional sources and new oil sources being found all over the world, how do you speed this transition and get from here to there?

Amory Lovins: Well, I'm not sure what boom you're talking about. When I read the Wall Street Journal, I see a headline a few weeks ago about coal running out of steam.

e360: China is consuming tremendous amounts of coal.

Lovins: Hang on — I look at the data and I find that in the United States, coal's share of the electrical services market, which is 95 percent of its market for fuel, has fallen by a quarter from 2005 through 2010, displaced by cheaper gas, efficiency, and renewables. And then when you look in the forward prices and the options market, that spread is going to keep widening. And when I hear how cheap natural gas is, I remember that it's also very volatile. This has nothing to do with the many uncertainties around fracking, which will take a decade to resolve — if they work out well, we'll be satisfied with a new option; if they don't, that's okay because we won't need that much gas, so we won't be very disappointed.

e360: Certainly in China, India, and the developing world there is a fossil fuel boom going on.

Lovins: But in a global context, there is a remarkable boom in efficiency and renewables in China, the world leader in five renewables. Part of the story in China is that the extraordinary vitality of renewables is coming very largely from the vibrant private sector, while all of the nuclear and half the coal business are the old state enterprises. So the story of incumbents and insurgents is partly the story of the reshaping of the Chinese economy from the old and rather bureaucratic command organizations. That is, I think, an encouraging trend.

Last I looked a couple of years ago, the private sector in China was something like 50 to 70 percent of the profits, the growth, and the new jobs. Of course there is still a lot of momentum in the coal bureaucracy in China and India, which together burned half the world's coal and account for about three-quarters of the projected increase, but I think those projections are looking quite dubious. In China, for example, they have lately retired over 70 gigawatts of inefficient coal plants, so that their coal plant fleet is now more efficient than ours. In 2010, 59 percent of their net new [electricity] capacity was coal. It used to be much higher.

e360: You feel we're in a period where fossil fuels over the next decade or two are going to be increasingly like whale oil?

Lovins: Yes.

e360: You've got the president of Shell writing a foreward to your book. There are prominent quotes from the president of Texaco in one section of the book. How do you persuade these oil companies that are making billions of dollars now and into the foreseeable future to get on board with this renewable energy revolution? What is going to persuade them to be on what you see as the right side of history?

Lovins: Mainly risk management, and as a member of the National Petroleum Council, having worked in this industry for 38 years, I've seen a lot of concern about risk. Oil is like airlines. It's a great industry and a bad business. Look at its fundamentals. It is extremely capital-intensive, long lead time, based on a wasting asset of which you only own about 6 percent and the rest can be taxed away or confiscated at any time. It is a business overflowing with all kinds of risk — technical, political, financial. It is unpopular politically. Its subsidies are at some political risk in this country. Put all that together and you have a magnificent recipe for headaches. Why would you want to be in a business like that?

e360:You're making huge profits at this point.

Lovins: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes it gushes red ink. So the smarter leaders in that industry have been trying to get out of the business since at least 1973, and have constructed some pretty intelligent portfolios of both activities and options that are getting rather rapidly diversified. Some companies that were not very foresighted, even though they were operationally excellent, are starting to smell the coffee.

I think there is a bright future for what we now think of as the oil industry in the new energy era, using its formidable capabilities and assets, but in different ways. A lot of refineries will turn into biorefineries; a lot of drilling will go to geothermal, possibly carbon sequestration and other pursuits. The fuel logistics will diversify into hydrogen — which of course is mainly a business of the oil industry right now and it's a very big business — and into electricity and biofuels. Shell is already the world's biggest distributor of biofuels. The average cost of getting our U.S. transport system off oil is about $18 a barrel for the efficiency and electrification part, or if you include the biofuels to run the trucks and airplanes to the extent they're not on hydrogen, it might be at most about $25 a barrel. So I don't much care what the world oil price is, this is a better bet and it very much better manages the risks.

e360: In the spheres that you write about — transportation, electricity generation, industry — what pieces of the puzzle need to be put in place in the coming decade or so to do this massive scaling up that's going to be required to attain your vision of an economy that by 2050 is primarily powered by renewable sources?

Lovins: Broadly we need to pay attention to allow or require full and fair competition, preferably at honest prices. And to use our most effective institutions to end-run our least effective institutions.

e360: For example?

Lovins: Well, we use private enterprise, co-evolving with civil society and sped up by military innovation, to end run Congress. The transition we describe requires no act of Congress. It's led by business for profit.

e360: So you want the private sector to end-run the dysfunctional political system?

Lovins: At the federal level, yes. There are policies required to unlock or speed the transition we described, but they could all be done administratively or at the state level, where most of the action is.

e360: From a technological point of view, how do you scale up wind and solar to the point where it can be generating the volume of electricity that you envision by 2050?

Lovins: The way we're scaling it up now. U.S. photovoltaics have doubled each of the last two years. World [photovoltaic] growth last year — a difficult year for many industries — was 70 percent. And 68 percent of Europe's new capacity last year was solar and wind. Wind, for example, is generally competitive without subsidy, even though the global wind industry will of course shift its projects in a given year to wherever they get the most subsidy, as you would expect. But even without subsidy they have a very strong business case.

e360: So you foresee in the U.S., Europe, and China a steady accretion of this scale and volume for these new sources?

Lovins: Yes, and China is leading the plummeting cost and rocketing volume of most of the renewables. They're the world leader in five. They aim to be in all. The ones they lead are photovoltaic, wind, small hydro, biogas, and solar thermal for hot water.

So this is actually quite a big business. Clean energy was a $260 billion investment flow in 2011. Europe has now more than one million new renewable jobs. The big winner is Germany. They have more solar workers than America has steel workers. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel bet that it would be smarter to send their energy money to their own engineers, manufacturers, and installers than to keep paying it to [Russia's] Gazprom. She's right, and it was a winning bet.

e360: In your book you are not counting on any sort of miraculous silver bullet technologies.

Lovins: No, no new inventions.

e360: But do you think there will be within a matter of decades technologies we can't envision that could even further accelerate this transition?

Lovins: Oh, yes. I think there will be many, and actually although we're not counting on any new inventions, we do give examples of emerging technologies in the lab about to get to market that are going to be quite powerful.

For example, windows whose ability to transmit or block heat is a function of the temperature of the glass, and that's a passive property. It doesn't require any control system. That sort of thing is so revolutionary we haven't even figured out how to use it yet. Or as another example, Tsutomu Shimomura, the computer security expert, has invented a way of controlling LED lighting in big buildings that gets rid of almost all of the wire and power supplies and controls, but gives superior control flexibility. And that should ultimately cut by manyfold the installed cost of those LED lighting systems and thus help them take over even faster in both new and old buildings. Fuel cells have already beaten the cost targets that we had expected. The list goes on.

Despite our woeful underinvestment in efficiency R&D, the technical progress here and abroad continues to accelerate with no end in sight and it's not just in widgets. It's also progress in new business models, new designs, ways of combining technologies more effectively to get expanding returns, not diminishing returns, new delivery channels that are rapidly maturing, new regulatory models. These things all together I think have put us irreversibly on the path to a new energy era, and a lot of it is an incumbents-versus-insurgents play where the incumbents have many intelligent ways they can respond and some dumb ways, one of which is called ostrich.

e360: Your book, in each of the main chapters, lays out detailed prescriptions — down to diagrams of factory piping — of how to improve efficiency and make advances. What has the reaction been to the book from corporations, from politicians?

Lovins: The reaction I have seen has been uniformly favorable, partly because it's a trans-ideological approach that focuses on outcomes, not motives. Whether you most care about profits, jobs, and competitive advantage, or about national security or environmental stewardship and climate and public health — regardless of the reason, you'll still want the outcomes. They'll still make sense and make money, so let's just do what we all agree ought to be done for whatever reason, not argue about what reason is most important, and then a lot of the stuff we may not agree about becomes superfluous. The military is very strongly on this track already — with both efficiency and resilient electric supply — for their own good reasons. We are not seeing so far political resistance to these ideas and we're getting a very warm welcome in the business community.

e360: How big an impediment to your vision of how to go forward is the fact that many of the leaders of the Republican Party not only deny the existence of climate change, but belittle renewable energy. Is the political gridlock on this issue a big impediment to maybe moving forward?

Lovins: I don't see it as a big impediment because we're not relying on Congress to do anything. Again, you don't have to believe climate science to think that the outcomes of Reinventing Fire are desirable. If you care about either making money or national security, either of those suffices; you may even care about both together. Then you're twice as motivated. We are counting in the analysis all externalities — carbon [reduction] and otherwise — as worth zero, a conservatively low estimate. And we still get a $5 trillion surplus from getting the U.S. completely off oil, coal, and nuclear energy and a third off natural gas by 2050, with a 2.6-fold bigger economy. That, I think, is an attractive outcome regardless of your political beliefs.

e360: Let's say there's a President Santorum or a President Romney, do you think that they could be persuaded once they're in office to embrace a vision like this?

Lovins: I don't know, but I don't much care. Rocky Mountain Institute is non-partisan, and we observe that most states, including many strongly Republican states, have renewable portfolio standards. The renewable leader in the nation is Texas, which is not noted for being environmentally minded, but does care a lot about making money and is very good at it. That's fine.

e360: On the issue of climate change, do you believe the climate movement has made a strategic error by focusing so much on the issue of warming and its impacts rather than on the positive economic message you propagate in the book?

Lovins: I think you could make that case. In fact, to go back to the beginning of the modern climate debate, I think that when the bogus studies were issued claiming that climate protection would be very costly, the environmental movement fell into a trap of saying it won't cost that much and it's worth it. What they should have said is, "No, you've got it wrong. Climate protection is not costly but profitable because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel."

So the whole climate conversation has been distorted by this error of mistaking cost for profits and that has blocked international negotiations, because it's so much harder to talk about cost burden and sacrifice, what is it worth to save the climate and who should pay for it, than to talk about profits, jobs, and competitive advantage, which should have been the subject all along.

I think it's partly for this reason that climate leadership has shifted from international negotiations and national policies to the private sector, and many companies are racing to pocket the real profits while the politicians and theoretical economists argue about how big the costs are. Dow [Chemical], for example, invested a billion dollars in efficiency and so far has $19 billion of savings to show for it. I don't think they are terribly concerned about what some theoretician says this will cost. They've added $18 billion net to their bottom line. They've very happy about it and their competitors have to catch up or lose share.

e360: When you look at your 2050 vision, yet you also look at all the carbon that's still being burned, how do you reconcile the two?

Lovins: Well, one system is dying and others are struggling to be born. It's a very exciting time, but I think the transitions that we need in how we design vehicles, buildings, and factories, and how we allow efficiency to compete with supply, are well under way. Most of the key sectors are already at or past their tipping point. And it's clearest for oil, but will become clearer for coal that the stuff is becoming uncompetitive even at relatively low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. It's the whale oil story all over again. They ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.

Anyone who refers a 'vulnerable' person to the energy firm for free loft and cavity wall insulation will receive cash bonus

British Gas will pay £50 to anyone who refers "vulnerable" family members, friends and neighbours for free loft and cavity wall insulation from the company.

Referrers will receive the sum for every individual on qualifying benefits whose details they pass on, with no limit to the number they can refer. Those who qualify must be on pension credit, certain income-related benefits or receiving child tax credit, and have an income of less than £16,190.

The referred customer will also receive £50 once the installation has been carried out, in addition to the money they will save on their bills following insulation.

Neither the referrer nor the beneficiary need to buy gas or electricity from British Gas to take part in the scheme, but the firm is also offering free insulation to all new and existing energy customers.

It takes less than a day to insulate a home, according to British Gas. Loft insulation is a thick material rolled on to the loft floor, while cavity wall insulation is filling squirted into the gap between your exterior and interior walls. Loft insulation can save households up to £175 a year on their heating bills, and cavity wall insulation can save up to £135.

Yet nearly half of Britain's homes are not insulated adequately, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Jon Kimber, managing director of British Gas New Energy, said: "With household budgets stretched we know that people are looking at ways to save money. £1 in every £4 spent on heating is wasted due to poor insulation, so energy efficiency can have a massive impact."

Customers interested in taking up the offer should call the British Gas insulation team on 0800 975 1195, when a free survey will be arranged at a convenient time for the customer. Calls must be made by the customer who is having the insulation installed, and they should give the details of the person who referred them.

Other companies are also offering incentives to encourage people to accept free insulation: E.ON pays £100 to households that have insulation installed, while Southern Electric will give a high street voucher worth £25 to anyone – not just customers – who take up their offer of free insulation.

Such incentives may go some way to helping those suffering from an "energy postcode lottery", revealed in research by Energyhelpline.com.

It shows that the gap between those paying the most and least for their energy has widened by more than 50% in the past year to £92.

Those in the west of the UK are paying more for their gas and electricity than those in the east, with consumers in Merseyside and north Wales having the highest energy bills in the country. A typical customer there will pay £1,373 a year – £82 more than those in the East Midlands and £92 more than people living in north Scotland.

Consumers in the West Midlands have the second highest annual bills, typically £1,333, with those in central and south Scotland close behind (£1,329).

Mark Todd, director of Energyhelpline.com, said: "It appears there is a band of higher prices sweeping across the country from Birmingham to Holyhead that is cutting deep into people's pockets.

"It is difficult to explain these variations, other than the fact suppliers charge what they feel they can get away with. Often the disparities arise because loyal customers stick to the same suppliers and these areas become profit hot spots. Switching supplier is the best way to send a message that higher prices will not be tolerated."

See if you can save money on your gas and electricity bills with guardian.co.uk

Energy for all is a key development aim, but realising it will require a convergence of international aid, carbon finance and government spending, with political will and good governance

For decades, achieving universal energy access has been a key development goal. Once solved, the resolution of many other development challenges might follow: lighting, cooking, heating, cooling, mobility and communications.

But the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook for 2011 estimates that 1.3 billion people across the world do not yet have access to electricity and 2.7 billion rely on traditional biomass for their energy needs. If we continue as we are, according to a recent report from development NGO Practical Action, 900 million people will not have access to electricity in 2030 and 3 billion will still be cooking with traditional fuels. That means 900 million people will live without decent lighting in their homes, and many millions will die of avoidable, smoke-related diseases.

In the run-up to the UN conference on sustainable development, Rio+20, achieving universal energy access remains a complex problem. In the past, significant resources have been marshalled and various strategies adopted in an attempt to realise the goal, from donated equipment, such as efficient cooking stoves, to finance from international development banks for electricity grids and power stations. Energy markets have been liberalised, often at the behest of the World Bank and other lenders, and equipment and fuels have been subsidised. The results have been mixed. In some cases – notably China in the 1980s and 1990s – access rates have improved dramatically. But for many poorer nations, it is hard to find evidence of significant progress.

The problems increase when the need to achieve sustainability goals is also factored in. Globally, drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required to tackle climate change. The UN has put these issues at the top of the agenda, with the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All. But given the poor record on achieving universal energy access – particularly for the poorest communities – what can we do to make a difference now, and can we do this while keeping within environmental limits?

Within the UN system, debates on energy access can often get lost within the official negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Under this convention, mechanisms designed with development in mind already exist. Most important is the clean development mechanism (CDM), which has been in operation for several years.

When proposed by Brazil, the aim was to help developing countries access low carbon technologies. In return, investors (largely from industrialised countries) can access carbon emissions allowances that can then be sold. Billions of dollars have flowed through the CDM, but the biggest beneficiary has been China. Sub-Saharan Africa barely registers in the CDM project statistics. While the CDM has clearly had positive impacts in China – not least in the wind power sector – it has done little to assist the poor.

In his book The Hidden Energy Crisis, Teodoro Sanchez, of Practical Action, proposes an alternative approach to the energy access challenge. He argues that the world's poor should not be constrained to low carbon energy options, and that a full range of methods should be employed to help the poor climb out of energy poverty.

Sanchez estimates that half the world's energy-poor could switch to cooking on sustainable biomass and half to liquefied petroleum gas. Furthermore, half could access electricity from diesel generators while the other half do so from renewable sources. If these plans were implemented, he argues, the increase in global CO2 emissions would be less than 2% above 2005 levels.

If the world takes climate change seriously, this increase could easily be absorbed by cuts in industrialised country emissions and further action to slow emissions growth in the rapidly developing countries (especially China). The cost of this up to 2030 would be about $570bn (including capacity building and institutional costs); less than 3% of the estimated global energy investments needed during the same period.

Doing the maths in this way is simple. However, putting such plans into practice is another matter – not least because this is only one view of the future, and elements of it are controversial. For example, if diesel generators are used so widely, how do the countries concerned avoid carbon lock-in – and make the eventual shift to other energy sources?

As our Steps Centre paper on energy pathways in low carbon development demonstrates, energy access is such a difficult problem partly because different actors in the developed and developing world disagree about the "best" way to solve it. Indeed, many different approaches are likely to be required, differing from country to country.

As Sanchez argues, a combination of international aid, carbon finance and government spending will be needed to realise these goals – alongside political will and good governance. But it is also critical to understand energy systems in the fullest sense if such interventions are to work. Interventions need to build on what already exists and to work with established stakeholders. There are some good pioneering examples already, such as the development of the solar-home system market in Tanzania, which involved local institutions such as TaTedo in partnership with multilateral agencies and local private firms.

Crucially, local institutions, markets and capacity in developing countries will need to be nurtured across a wide range of skills and knowledge – for example in policy, management, design, installation, maintenance, operation and innovation. The real challenge, therefore, is to implement such strategies effectively while learning from the mistakes of the past.

• Rob Byrne and Jim Watson head the energy and climate change team at the Steps Centre

The row over the EU's plan to label tar sands oil as highly polluting escalates as Canada says it 'will not hesitate to defend its interests'

Canada has threatened a trade war with European Union over the bloc's plan to label oil from Alberta's vast tar sands as highly polluting, the Guardian can reveal, before a key vote in Brussels on 23 February.

"Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests, including at the World Trade Organisation," state letters sent to European commissioners by Canada's ambassador to the EU and its oil minister, released under freedom of information laws.

The move is a significant escalation of the row over the EU's plans, which Canada fears would set a global precedent and derail its ability to exploit its tar sands, which are the biggest fossil fuel reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia. Environmental groups argue that exploitation of the tar sands, also called oil sands, is catastrophic for the global climate, as well as causing serious air and water pollution in Alberta.

Darek Urbaniak, at Friends of the Earth Europe, which obtained the new documents, said: "These letters are further evidence of Canadian government and industry lobbying, which continuously undermines efforts to combat climate change. We find it unacceptable that the Canadian government now openly uses direct threats at the highest political levels to derail crucial EU climate legislation."

The unveiling of Canada's threats is the latest in a series of recent embarrassing revelations. On 12 February, the occurrence of a secret strategy "retreat" in London in 2011 was discovered. High-level officials discussed the "critical" issue of winning the tar sands argument in the EU, to "mitigate the impact on the Canadian brand" and to protect the "huge investments from the likes of Shell, BP, Total and Statoil". Representatives of Shell, Total and Statoil attended the meeting alongside the UK's state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

In December, the Guardian revealed the secret high-level help given to the Canada by the UK government, which included David Cameron discussing the issue with his counterpart Stephen Harper during a visit to Canada, and stating privately that the UK wanted "to work with Canada on finding a way forward". Canada's minister for natural resources, Joe Oliver, stated: "[The British] have been very, very helpful."

The UK proposed an alternative "banded" approach to ascribing carbon emissions to different fuel types, which does not single out tar sands. But environmentalists dismiss it as a delaying tactic and the Guardian understands that the UK has failed to present its proposal formally or provide supporting evidence.

In the newly released documents, Canada's ambassador to the EU, David Plunkett, wrote in December to Connie Hedegaard, European commissioner for climate action, about the EU plans under the fuel quality directive (FQD). "If the final measures single out oil sands crude in a discriminatory, arbitrary or unscientific way, or are otherwise inconsistent with the EU's international trade obligations, I want to state that Canada will explore every avenue at its disposal to defend its interests, including at the World Trade Organisation." In October, Oliver wrote to the European commissioner for energy, Günther Oettinger and Baroness Catherine Ashton, vice-president of the commission, stating: "If unjustified, discriminatory measures to implement the fuel quality directive are put in place, Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests."

A Canadian government spokeswoman told the Guardian: "We oppose an FQD that discriminates against oil sands crude without strong scientific basis. The oil sands are a proven strategic resource for Canada; we will continue to promote Canada's oil sands as they are key to Canada's economic prosperity and energy security."

The European Commission disputes the charge that its plans are not based on science. Hedegaard told the Guardian: "The Commission identified the most carbon-intensive sources in its science-based proposal. This way high-emission fossil fuels will be labelled and given the proper value. It is only reasonable to give high values to more polluting products than to less polluting products. I of course hope the member states will follow the Commission [and vote for] this environmentally sound initiative."

Colin Baines, toxic fuels campaign manager at the Co-operative, said: "There is a wealth of independent science stating that tar sands fuels emit significantly more carbon than conventional oil, no matter how many briefings Canada gives claiming otherwise." The EU proposal is to label tar sands oil as causing 22% more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil on average. The increase results from the energy needed to blast the bitumen from the bedrock and refine it.

Baines added: "The Canadian government's aggressive lobbying and attempted intimidation of the EU is making it look increasingly desperate. But its threat of a WTO challenge faces one massive problem: tar sands oil is not a 'like product' with crude oil so no unlawful discrimination exists under WTO. The EU must adhere to the science and penalise the higher emissions."

Many European oil companies have major interests in the Canadian tar sands. In January, the Guardian revealed a secret compromise plan that would weaken the impact on tar sands oil, this time from the Netherlands, home of Shell. BP, headquartered in the UK, had already in their own words "bent the ear" of the UK's energy minister. Total in France and ENI in Italy also have tar sands interests and those nations are believed to be opposed to the EU plan.

If the FQD proposal fails to win the required majority in the vote on Thursday it faces an arduous fight for survival through the European council and parliament. The UK's votes are seen as crucial, but a government spokeswoman declined to say which way the UK would vote. The issue has become a difficult one for the responsible minister, Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, who frequently supports environmental policies. On 10 February, he said: "For climate change reasons, I do not think it would be helpful to extend our reliance on fossil fuels any more than necessary," before a meeting about proposals to extract shale gas using fracking near his constituency in Lewes.

His party colleague, Chris Davies MEP, who is the Lib Dem environment spokesman in the European parliament, said: "It is extraordinarily naive for ministers and officials to take the special pleading by Canada as though it were gospel truth, rather than what it is – an attempt to protect narrow financial interests." In 2009, Simon Hughes MP, and now deputy leader of the Lib Dems said: "World leaders must work towards a treaty that will outlaw tar sands extraction, in the same way they came together to ban land mines, blood diamonds and cluster bombs."

In December, Canada unilaterally pulled out of the world's only binding climate change treaty, the Kyoto protocol, having increased its emissions of greenhouse gases by a third instead of reducing them by 6%. In public, the Canadian government claimed that tar sands are "sustainable" but in private it has admitted there is no "credible scientific information" to support this. Canada suffered a setback in January, when Barack Obama rejected a proposal for a controversial pipeline called Keystone XL to import bring tar sands oil from Alberta, though Republicans in congress are working to reinstate the pipeline.

New report from Energy and Climate Change Committee calls on government to establish long term goals for marine energy

The government will today be called on to increase its support for wave and tidal power in a new report from MPs warning the UK is at risk of repeating mistakes which allowed the country to lose its early lead in the developing wind power industry.

MPs on the Commons' Energy and Climate Change Committee (ECC) on Monday released a report on the future of marine renewables, which will claim the UK could become a leading exporter of wave and tidal power equipment and expertise if the government adopts a more visionary approach to developing marine energy.

Seven of the the eight full-scale prototype devices installed worldwide are in UK waters, making the country the current world leader in the development of wave and tidal energy technologies.

The government has also recognised that marine power could provide up to 27GW of capacity in the UK by 2050, much of which is expected to be deployed after 2020.

But the report warns that an overly cautious approach to deployment may allow other less risk-averse countries to steal the UK's lead.

Industry players are concerned that government proposals for subsidies for marine and tidal only extend to 2017, leaving a question mark over the sector's long-term future.

The ECC report will issue a series of recommendations designed to ensure the UK retains its leading position, including clarifying how much revenue support marine power can expect to receive beyond 2017 as soon as possible.

It also recommends the government boost investor certainly by setting a target to reduce the cost of marine energy to 14p per kWh by 2020.

According to the Carbon Trust, the first wave farms are likely to cost 38-48p/kWh and the first tidal farms 29-33p/kWh, although developers remain confident costs will fall as technologies mature.

"Britannia really could rule the waves when it comes to marine renewable energy," said committee chairman Tim Yeo. "We are extremely well placed to lead the world in wave and tidal technologies, which could potentially bring significant benefits in manufacturing and jobs, as well an abundant supply of reliable low-carbon electricity."

The report urges the government not to repeat the same mistake it made in the 1980s in developing wind power, which saw the UK lose its one-time lead in research and testing wind turbines to Denmark, which is now home to the world's largest supplier of wind turbines.

"In the eighties the UK squandered the lead it had in wind power development and now Denmark has a large share of the worldwide market in turbine manufacturing," added Yeo. "It should be a priority for the Government to ensure that the UK remains at the cutting edge of developments in this technology and does not allow our lead to slip."

A spokeswoman from the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the government was "fully committed to spurring on the growth of this industry".

"[We] have already taken great strides to make this happen," she said. "Last month Climate Change Minister Greg Barker launched the South West Marine Energy Park and there are plans to create similar parks in Scotland and Northern Ireland."

The report was welcomed by green groups and renewable trade associations, including the UK's leading marine power trade body Renewable UK.

"The marine energy industry is now on the threshold of commercial viability, and the Committee's report contains important recommendations which, if implemented, will help push it towards becoming a major part of our electricity generation system," said RenewableUK director of policy Dr Gordon Edge.

"Certainty is the watchword for securing the investment marine energy will require to become a major power source. We don't yet have that certainty, and the Committee's call for long-term clarity on Government support for marine energy is timely."

Angus Norman, chief executive of Ocean Power Technologies Ltd, agreed the UK needs to take further action to accelerate the commercialisation of marine energy.

"Whilst recent proposals by the UK government to support the development of the sector go a long way to strengthen the business case for harnessing marine energy, the report makes a timely and strong case for further impetus if the UK is to extend its leadership in this sector and make it a commercial-scale marine renewable industry," he said.

Friends of the Earth energy campaigner Paul Steedman said the report was right to highlight the UK's huge potential for marine power.

"Most people don't know we're already world leaders in this technology," he said. ""The right support for this pioneering industry would create tens of thousands of new jobs and provide a home-grown source of clean energy.

"The Government must make it easier for marine power developers to transform our broken energy system and shift us off our dangerous reliance on coal and gas."

The deal signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy sends a clear signal of both countries' commitment to a nuclear future

Although the UK-French nuclear power deal signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy today does not add up to much in terms of its details – a few hundred millions here and there, not much in the multi-billion-pound world of civil nuclear generation – it does send an important political signal: Britain and France will not follow Germany down the path of eschewing nuclear power. Instead, the governments and industries of both countries will work closely together to up the pace of nuclear new-build in the UK.

This matters, because within the next 10 years all but one of our current fleet of nuclear reactors will be decommissioned – meaning the UK will lose nearly a fifth of its electricity-generation capacity, all of it zero-carbon. Even if we build windmills flat-out and stick solar panels on as many buildings as we can afford, this lost nuclear capacity must be urgently replaced – or Britain's carbon emissions will inevitably rise as we burn more coal and gas to bridge the gap.

It is instructive that the German Green party is now weakening climate targets at a state level – precisely because the nuclear phase-out leaves the country more reliant on domestic dirty brown coal and imported Russian gas. Despite insisting that climate change remains their pre-eminent concern, greens around Europe insist on putting their anti-nuclear ideology ahead of any concern for the stability of our planet's climate. Both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are effectively lobbying for more gas plants in their anti-nuclear campaigning, making a mockery of their years spent raising awareness of global warming.

Although a small number of "environmentalist" protesters (eight at the last count) have already moved onto the proposed site for the UK's two first new nuclear stations at Hinkley Point in Somerset, today's Anglo-French deal makes it far less likely that they will have their way and stop or delay new nuclear construction. Hinkley is in line for Britain's first two EPRs – a new "generation-III"-type power station able to pump out a hefty 1.6 gigawatts of zero-carbon power at full capacity. The EPR also includes protection against airline impacts for its reactor dome and an impressive array of safety features, which would make a Fukushima-style meltdown vanishingly unlikely and any radiation properly containable even if the worst ever did happen.

Unfortunately, all these new safety features help make the EPR fabulously expensive: two EPR reactors under construction in Finland at Olkiluoto, and in France at Flamanville are both years behind schedule and billions over budget. Although these might be passed off as first-of-a-kind engineering problems – and indeed the two other EPRs under construction at Taishan, in China, are proceeding on budget and on time – the UK government is clearly nervous about the abilities of Areva and EDF (both state-owned French companies) to get the flagship Hinkley Point plants built and generating power for the grid by the planned dates of 2018 and 2019 respectively.

There is also a danger that Britain will become over-reliant on France for its nuclear capacity, although today's deal with Rolls-Royce for power-station components potentially worth £400m offsets this somewhat. Areva in particular is currently lobbying heavily for the UK government to commit to a new plant (likely at Sellafield) to convert the country's 100-tonne plutonium stockpile into "mixed-oxide" fuel (MOX), which can be burned in its EPR stations. However – as the Guardian recently revealed – there are fourth-generation technologies already available that can dispose of both plutonium and waste stockpiles much more reliably and cheaply.

Today's deal does envisage some fourth-generation nuclear co-operation – on a prototype sodium-cooled fast reactor called Astrid – but France does not envisage deployment until 2040 at the earliest. The UK could and should be much more ambitious, because new fast reactors offer a way of solving the nuclear waste problem by burning up all the long-lived elements that make current waste a concern for tens of thousands of years, and leaving only a smaller residue that is effectively safe within just three centuries.

But the Prism reactors, which recycle and burn waste, are offered not by a French company but by GE-Hitachi, a US-based firm. Moreover, GE's new ESBWR boiling water reactor may offer a higher degree of passive safety, and cheaper construction, than the EPR – though this, of course, is not something that Sarkozy would ever admit to Cameron.

Whichever models of reactor are chosen for Britain – and Westinghouse's AP1000 is also in the running, for the site at Wylfa in Anglesey and perhaps elsewhere – decisions need to be made soon. Current government plans envisage a hefty 19 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity available by 2025, but if this vision is to become a reality the UK needs to get a move on. Hopefully today's deal will be a help rather than a hindrance in this much-needed energy and climate effort.

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A new report from Michigan Public Service Commission says that the cost of renewable energy is now less than coal in the state, in part due to Michigan’s Renewable Energy Standard.

Peabody Energy and GreatPoint Energy signed an agreement to develop coal-to-gas and coal-to-hydrogen projects in the U.S. and around the world with carbon capture and storage technology.

The Babcock & Wilcox Co. said its subsidiary, Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group Inc., has been selected as the environmental control technology provider for several of Luminant's coal-fired power plants.

GreatPoint Energy has completed a $1.25 billion deal to build a large-scale plant for converting coal to natural gas in China.

The Weekly Coal Production shows how much coal is being produced across the U.S.

Summit Power Group has signed $2 billion in engineering, procurement and construction contracts that will reportedly guarantee the price of building a proposed $2.8 billion, 400 MW coal-fired power plant with carbon capture technology in Texas.

Duke Energy and China Huaneng Group Feb. 13 signed a new, three-year agreement expanding their research cooperation of advanced coal and carbon capture and sequestration technologies.

Novinda Corp. on Feb. 13 said it received $6 million in Series C equity financing to support the product launch of a non-carbon reagent for mercury emission control in coal-fired power plants.

American Electric Power Co. said the company would close 13 percent less coal-fired generation than initially planned because of $940 million in support from the state of Kentucky to keep a unit operating there.

American Electric Power subsidiary Southwestern Electric Power Co. (SWEPCO) has asked the Arkansas Public Service Commission (APSC) to review the company’s plans to install environmental controls on the 528 MW coal-fired Flint Creek Power Plant.

British Gas-owner announces acquisition on eve of annual results, where forecast profits of £2.5bn are expected to reignite debate over household bills

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, has boosted its presence in North Sea exploration with a £246m deal for seven oil and gas fields.

The energy group announced the acquisition on the eve of annual results that are set to stoke the debate over household bills, with Centrica forecast to post a 4% increase in pre-tax profits to £2.5bn. Wednesday's deal with Total, the French multinational, means that Centrica has increased its oil and gas reserves by 45% since last year, following two deals with Norway's state-owned Statoil.

Mark Hanafin, managing director of Centrica Energy, said: "This acquisition in the North Sea provides a good fit with our existing portfolio and strategy, bringing strong cash flow and adding value for Centrica. It underlines our commitment to invest where we see attractive opportunities, securing future energy supplies for the UK."

The Total fields are in three areas that have estimated reserves of 22m barrels of oil equivalent [boe] and are expected to produce around 9,300 boe a day this year. About 64% of the output will be oil.

North Sea oil and gas production has fallen since its prime in 1999 when the UK was the world's sixth largest player in the market. It has now slipped to 18th, but up to 24bn more barrels of oil are still expected to be discovered over the next 30 years, according to calculations by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Centrica's oil and gas production business, also known as its "upstream arm", generates about 43% of the group's pre-tax profits and supplies about 80% of British Gas's energy. According to analysts, Centrica is expected to announce that pre-tax profits at its UK gas residential business, where it serves 16m households, have fallen 25% to £550m owing to a warm 2011. However, rising oil and gas prices will have buoyed its upstream business, contributing to a 4% rise in pre-tax profits, which will fall to around £1.3bn once a 40% tax rate is applied.

Meanwhile, in another major exploration deal, Anglo-Dutch group Shell made an agreed £992.4m bid for Mozambique-focused Cove Energy, in an attempt to open up a new gas frontier for oil majors in East Africa.

Utilities supplier SSE launches simplified tariffs system and website price-comparison tool

Energy company SSE has slashed the number of tariffs it offers and launched a price-comparison tool to help customers choose the cheapest deal for their needs.

The energy supplier, which is the second largest in the UK and provides gas and electricity to consumers through Southern Electric, Hydro and Swalec brands, and an online arm called Atlantic, said this was "the most significant change" it had ever made to its range.

SSE customers can now choose from four core products: two fixed-price deals and two variable-rate deals, one offering a discount on the standard tariff to customers who are prepared to tie in for two years. Once price differentials for paperless billing and other options, such as free energy-usage meters, are added, SSE is effectively offering 15 different tariffs, instead of the 68 that were previously available.

The company said that by offering four core tariffs, and then allowing customers to refine their options, it was making it easier for them to find the best product for their circumstances. To help customers shop around quickly, it has introduced a price-comparison tool to its website. Customers who input just their postcode can see how much each of the four tariffs will cost for the average energy customer. They can then refine this by answering five questions about their usage, meter, payment and billing options, and choosing any additional features such as Argos points, or green-energy options.

The change follows the launch of a 10-point plan to rebuild consumers' trust in energy suppliers, announced by SSE in October 2011. This saw the firm commit to offering all of its tariffs to both new and existing customers and change the way it buys energy on the wholesale markets.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, generation and supply director at SSE, said buying energy had become too complex: "Energy customers want choice, but most customers have a straightforward set of requirements and when they look at the products offered by an energy supplier it should be easy for them to find out which is the best deal for them.

"In October, SSE committed to end the complexity that surrounds tariffs and significantly reduce the number of tariffs it offers. That is exactly what we are doing and I believe this is the most significant change SSE has ever made to its product range."

Phillips-Davies said existing customers could stay on their current deals but the company hoped to migrate them onto new deals by the end of the year. He said that while most would be able to get a similar tariff to their current one, "a small rump" of customers may prefer to stay put. These could include those who currently have deals without standing charges, which SSE has scrapped in anticipation of them being stopped by the energy regulator Ofgem.

The move comes as Ofgem reaches the end of a consultation on how to improve the energy market for consumers, which includes proposals to simplify tariffs. British Gas and EDF have already reduced their product ranges, but the regulator could eventually force the companies to offer a single standard tariff, alongside other deals that would run on fixed terms.

SSE said this approach would be detrimental for consumers, who would only be able to sign up to money-saving deals such as Economy 7 for limited periods and would have to remember to re-sign up afterwards.

Audrey Gallacher, director of energy at Consumer Focus, said customers were "often bewildered" by the complexity and number of energy tariffs on offer and this could form a major barrier to people switching to a better deal. She said: "SSE's moves to address this problem are welcome. A simplified range of products should hopefully make it easier for people to understand and compare rates. It is also good to see the firm end the unfair practice of customers buying face-to-face and over the phone being denied the cheapest deals."

However, Gallacher said customers would only be able to make informed choices if they were able to make comparisons across the whole of the industry. "Ofgem is currently consulting on proposals to simplify tariffs and it is essential that these reforms deliver if customers are to engage more with this market," she said.

Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at price switching website uSwitch.com, said: "This is the direction that Ofgem wants the market to move in so it will be really interesting to see how SSE's customers react and whether it does give the market the boost that Ofgem is hoping for."

Anyone who refers a 'vulnerable' person to the energy firm for free loft and cavity wall insulation will receive cash bonus

British Gas will pay £50 to anyone who refers "vulnerable" family members, friends and neighbours for free loft and cavity wall insulation from the company.

Referrers will receive the sum for every individual on qualifying benefits whose details they pass on, with no limit to the number they can refer. Those who qualify must be on pension credit, certain income-related benefits or receiving child tax credit, and have an income of less than £16,190.

The referred customer will also receive £50 once the installation has been carried out, in addition to the money they will save on their bills following insulation.

Neither the referrer nor the beneficiary need to buy gas or electricity from British Gas to take part in the scheme, but the firm is also offering free insulation to all new and existing energy customers.

It takes less than a day to insulate a home, according to British Gas. Loft insulation is a thick material rolled on to the loft floor, while cavity wall insulation is filling squirted into the gap between your exterior and interior walls. Loft insulation can save households up to £175 a year on their heating bills, and cavity wall insulation can save up to £135.

Yet nearly half of Britain's homes are not insulated adequately, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Jon Kimber, managing director of British Gas New Energy, said: "With household budgets stretched we know that people are looking at ways to save money. £1 in every £4 spent on heating is wasted due to poor insulation, so energy efficiency can have a massive impact."

Customers interested in taking up the offer should call the British Gas insulation team on 0800 975 1195, when a free survey will be arranged at a convenient time for the customer. Calls must be made by the customer who is having the insulation installed, and they should give the details of the person who referred them.

Other companies are also offering incentives to encourage people to accept free insulation: E.ON pays £100 to households that have insulation installed, while Southern Electric will give a high street voucher worth £25 to anyone – not just customers – who take up their offer of free insulation.

Such incentives may go some way to helping those suffering from an "energy postcode lottery", revealed in research by Energyhelpline.com.

It shows that the gap between those paying the most and least for their energy has widened by more than 50% in the past year to £92.

Those in the west of the UK are paying more for their gas and electricity than those in the east, with consumers in Merseyside and north Wales having the highest energy bills in the country. A typical customer there will pay £1,373 a year – £82 more than those in the East Midlands and £92 more than people living in north Scotland.

Consumers in the West Midlands have the second highest annual bills, typically £1,333, with those in central and south Scotland close behind (£1,329).

Mark Todd, director of Energyhelpline.com, said: "It appears there is a band of higher prices sweeping across the country from Birmingham to Holyhead that is cutting deep into people's pockets.

"It is difficult to explain these variations, other than the fact suppliers charge what they feel they can get away with. Often the disparities arise because loyal customers stick to the same suppliers and these areas become profit hot spots. Switching supplier is the best way to send a message that higher prices will not be tolerated."

See if you can save money on your gas and electricity bills with guardian.co.uk

Customers encouraged to switch tariff by supermarket-based sales staff could be worse off, says Which? study

Supermarket sales teams for large energy companies are using underhand sales and leaving consumers who switch tariffs worse off by hundreds of pounds a year, the consumer group Which? has claimed.

The group went undercover to check the energy firms' sales teams who approach shoppers in supermarkets and big shopping centres in a bid to get them to switch supplier, and said its staff were told they could save as much as £142 if they switched supplier there and then. But when Which? crunched the numbers it found many consumers would actually have been between £39 and £311 worse off had they taken the energy companies' advice.

Which? said all of the sales teams based savings quotes on the assumption the customer was on a standard tariff, which tend to be the most expensive deals available.

Even when the undercover researchers returned to the salesperson after the sale to provide them with the name of their cheaper tariff, none altered the quoted savings, and only half said it could make a difference to the amount saved.

In a separate investigation, Which? found that when people call up energy companies asking for the cheapest deal they may not be getting accurate information and quotes every time. While four of the major energy suppliers performed well, British Gas and E.ON still got it wrong. Similarly, when researchers asked the salespeople in supermarkets and shopping centres about better deals, only two out of 13 admitted there may be better offers available.

Richard Lloyd, executive director at Which?, said: "It is simply not good enough for energy salespeople to be quoting misleading individual savings to people who sign up to switch in supermarkets. It's little wonder that trust in the energy sector is so low. We want the energy suppliers to build confidence among consumers that switching is both simple and worthwhile."

A spokesperson for the energy firms association Energy UK defended the role of salesmen in the sector. "It is important that consumers can have confidence in the sales process, which is covered by the industry's EnergySure Code. All salespeople undergo training and the code is audited annually. All customers who sign up to a contract will receive a written estimate, and there is often also a check phonecall to confirm the details," he said.

"In addition, there is always at least a week's cooling-off period, so if a customer isn't satisfied and decides that the new offer is not right for them then they can still change their mind."

Meanwhile, Which? has launched a new initiative called The Big Switch. It is hoping that 80,000 households will join together as a group to get a cheaper deal. Which? is aiming to negotiate a market-leading deal with the energy companies on behalf of those that have joined. Consumers have until 31 March to sign up.

See if you can save money on your electricity and gas bills with guardian.co.uk

Energy experts say combination of exit fees and previous price rises mean people on fixed-rate tariffs are still quids in

Most consumers who have opted for a fixed-rate energy tariff are better off sticking with their deal than switching to a variable rate, despite recent gas and electricity price cuts.

The 'big six' energy suppliers recently announced they will cut prices for those on variable tariffs by an average of £34, or 2.6% a year. But product comparison website uSwitch says people on fixed price plans are still benefitting from cheaper bills than if they were on a standard variable tariff.

Tom Lyon, energy expert at uSwitch, said: "As a result of the £224 or 21% hike in prices that started at the end of 2010, consumers flocked to fixed price plans. Now with energy prices falling some will be wondering whether they did the right thing."

However, Lyon said that even after the most recent cuts prices would still need to fall by £170 or 13.5% before those on fixed-rate deals would be out of pocket compared with standard plan customers.

Even though the cost of fixed tariffs has risen since summer 2011, Lyon said they account for four out of eight current best buys.

Mark Todd, director of Energyhelpline, said: "Those on fixed tariffs will miss out on the recent cuts, but they are still massively quids in because these deals are still much, much cheaper than the standard ones offered by the big six providers even after the price cut."

However, the cheapest variable rate online plan would cost the average energy consumer £1,030 a year – £29 less than the cheapest plan fixed until March 2013.

This means consumers need to weigh up longer-term security against the potential for further price cuts, Lyon said: "The fixed price plan will not benefit from price cuts, while the online plan potentially could – although there are no guarantees. What the fixed price plan will do, though, is protect you against price rises in the medium to long term, so consumers need to consider how important this price security is to them."

Normally, consumers wanting to switch out of a fixed-rate deal early would have to pay exit penalties. British Gas charges £50 each for switching out of gas and electricity price fixes, while M&S Energy charges up to £75 and EDF up to £70. These charges can easily wipe out the benefit of switching to a cheaper deal.

But nPower and E.ON have said they will waive exit penalties for a period of time for existing fixed-rate customers, leaving them free to move on if their deal becomes uncompetitive. Co-operative Energy has called on the rest of the big six – British Gas, SSE, EDF and Scottish Power – to follow suit and allow consumers to benefit from cheaper prices.

The Co-op has also promised to pay the exit penalties for the first 10,000 customers who want to switch to its single variable tariff, crediting the customer's first bill about three months after joining. It charges the average customer £1,144 a year.

Todd said some people, particularly those on expensive British Gas and SSE fixed-rate deals, could benefit from this offer. But for those not tied by penalties the online variable and fixed-rate deals from First Utility are much cheaper, charging £1,030 a year for the online version and £1,060 for the deal fixed until May 2013.

And there is good news even for those who switched to EDF's three-year fixed deal, which costs the average customer £1,084 a year. "It is a good long-term option," Todd said. "It is still cheaper than the Co-op tariff and although prices are only likely to go down this year, who knows what will happen in 2013?"

Check out whether you could benefit from switching via the Guardian's gas and electricity pricing service.

David Cameron believes he is on a crusade to drive a new "moral capitalism" (Report, 19 January). He should read Will Hutton on stakeholder capitalism and look to Germany, where employee representatives engage in corporate decision-making including levels of executive pay, local banks provide long-term support to business, apprenticeships remain common, stakeholders include suppliers and distributors, and community engagement stems from a responsibility to protect the interests of all employees.

The ghastly alternative of shareholder capitalism engineered by Conservative governments in the 1980s, and cravenly supported by New Labour, has destroyed UK manufacturing and turned the country into a spivs' paradise, with investment banks and hedge-fund managers holding everyone, including the government, to ransom. Where is the moral compass in gambling on corporate failure? Or in ensuring that one of the few profitable UK manufacturing sectors left is an arms industry mostly in partnership with the US, a war-exporting economy?

Shareholder capitalism regards share value as the only criterion for success, encouraging foreign takeover of businesses like Cadbury's that for 176 years had applied Quaker principles. Asset-stripping has become a national sport, devastating families and communities. It is inconceivable that Cameron will reverse this ruinous crusade on behalf of the super-rich parasites who have devastated the UK economy.

The tragedy is that the stakeholder model remains under attack throughout the western world. Without a multilateral turnaround by all OECD countries, beginning with the closure of tax havens and the imposition of a financial transaction tax, and the establishment of a World Environment Organisation possessing common powers and veto alongside the World Trade Organisation, we are heading towards an economic, environmental and social meltdown.
Simon Sweeney
University of York

• While Tweedledum and Tweedledee argue over the nature of "popular capitalism" (Socialism belongs here, 21 January), mainstream solutions on both left and right will only deepen our social and economic crisis in the long run. The suggestion that China might be the model to follow to cure our economic woes shows how out of touch with reality we have become (China's success challenges a failed economic consensus, 18 January). While backing the idea that public ownership should be at the heart of a solution, we must also recognise that China-style 9% annual growth in GDP across all countries would spell long-term disaster for the planet and its inhabitants. The thinktank Green House has embarked on a year-long project to describe the economic and social characteristics of a world in which indiscriminate growth is not a precondition for prosperity. We need a new alternative, not simply a false choice between austerity and increased GDP.
Professor Andrew Dobson
Green House thinktank

• The UK government is "delighted" that the Chinese government has bought a substantial holding in the company that controls the privatised utility Thames Water (Report, 21 January). Deutsche Bahn, still the monopoly and state-owned German railway company, now owns a major privatised British transport interest (Arriva). A major element of our power generation industry has been bought by EDF, in which the French state has a controlling interest. Even Barclays, determined to be independent of the UK government's efforts to bail out the banking sector, now has the state-owned Qatar Investment Authority as its largest shareholder. But our own government, having become the principal shareholder in some of our banks, is so keen to get rid of them that it is prepared to sell Northern Rock to Virgin at a major loss to the taxpayer. So it looks like it's OK for foreign governments to control important UK assets, but not OK for the UK government to do so. Or am I missing something?
Dr Bernard Naylor
Southampton

• As we step gingerly into the new year, one cannot help but be struck by the degree of political and economic hopelessness which pervades Europe, as governments strain to outdo each other in feats of austerity for fear of the market's terrible retribution. Meanwhile, unemployment continues to rise and faith in politics and capitalism itself erodes.

The Bank of England should redirect some of its QE toward "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects: social housing, fibre-optic broadband, motorway widening, acceleration of Crossrail etc. Where possible, let the private sector evaluate the economic viability of each project and carry out the work. This funding may also be more effective than conventional QE in creating the demand growth we wish to see and support our economy until the banks and the government itself have stabilised their balance sheets.

The Bank cannot, by statute, be exposed to private sector losses, but this could be overcome by issuing infrastructure bonds via a government entity with guarantee attached to safeguard the Bank against such an occurrence. It is hard to see how such money-printing would be inflationary given the spare capacity in our economy currently. In time, the Bank could reduce its support and balance sheet by selling the bonds, helping to create a retail bond market.

Something similar could be done in the eurozone with the ECB funding the EU's structural and cohesion funds.

Keynes may be dead, but surely we can adopt his teachings for the modern era rather than submit to this austerity-fuelled melancholy.
Michael Bourke
FPP Asset Management

• The call from the IMF, the World Bank and other international agencies for a move away from job-killing austerity towards green policies and infrastructure spending (IMF warns of risk posed by global austerity plans, 20 January) must shape the growing debate around the slippery concept of responsible capitalism. Since 2008 the Green New Deal Group has been documenting just such an action plan. So here is one we made earlier.

Step one, the government must put its only significant job generator, the "Green Deal", on economic steroids. £275bn has been e-printed and frittered into the coffers of banks via quantitative easing. The expected next round QE 3 should instead allocate £20bn to kick start a huge energy saving programme involving up to 14 million homes. This would start to tackle the coalition's biggest deficit – adequate demand in the economy. Step two, use some of this money to act as a guarantor to attract further private funding, particularly pension funds. This could be used to train and employ a carbon army to crawl over every building in the UK to make them energy-efficient. Younger people would be the main beneficiaries, particularly in urban areas where the vast majority live. Leveraging billions from pension funds to employ the young would be a welcome act of intergenerational solidarity.

If the government doesn't listen to the IMF and immediately adopt such a programme, this would give the two Eds something large-scale and concrete to propose, ie a "Green Prosperity not Blue Austerity" approach that puts clear green-blue water between Labour and the coalition.
Colin Hines
Convenor, Green New Deal Group

• Tristram Hunt is quite right to argue that is a long tradition in Britain of opposition to the excesses of the unfettered free market, and that the choice is most certainly not between Brent Cross and Soviet-style central planning. What he fails to emphasise sufficiently, though, is that there are many versions of the modern "market economy" ranging from the Nordic social-democratic model to Chinese state-led development. Cameron's "popular capitalism", like Thatcherism before it, points towards the deregulated capitalism associated with the United States. But it is precisely this finance-dominated Anglo-Saxon model which in recent years has been found wanting. One needs only turn to egalitarian Denmark or Sweden to see that the market, however poor a master, can be a good servant.
Professor George Irvin
Soas, University of London

• Larry Elliott believes that the rating agencies' failures in assessing sub-prime investments don't detract from the accuracy of their downgrades of sovereign debt (Cuts on the menu as five-star guests arrive, 16 January). Maybe, but how do the agencies calculate, if at all, the precise impact of their predictions on investors' behaviour and the subsequent economic credibility of the downgraded nations? If they don't or can't include such impacts in their predictions, then surely we are into similar epistemological territory to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle – crudely, that by attempting to measure the phenomena they are affecting the very outcomes being investigated; here, making the economic situation worse. If they can predict their impacts, I'd like to get some money on their forecasts for the next meeting at Bath racecourse.
Bryn Jones
Bath

Thames Water deal follows talks in Beijing this week with chancellor George Osborne

The Chinese state has made its first direct investment in Britain's creaking infrastructure system, days after George Osborne took a begging bowl to China.

The sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation (CIC), has bought an 8.68% holding in Kemble, the privately owned group that controls Thames Water, which has 14 million customers in and around London.

The move was confirmed in a one-sentence statement posted on the CIC website. No value was given nor the name of the seller but analysts said it was likely to have changed hands for between £600m and £700m.

The British government expressed delight and said it reflected a success for Osborne and David Cameron, who have been abroad separately this week trying to encourage state-owned funds in China and Saudi Arabia to invest in the UK.

The chancellor said: "It is a vote of confidence in Britain as a place to invest and do business. This investment is good news for both the British and Chinese economies."

Osborne held meetings with Wang Qishan, China's vice-premier, and Lou Jiwei, the chairman of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and CIC on Tuesday.

The government has been looking at ways to support greater private sector and foreign investment in infrastructure and there has been speculation that China would help develop HS2, the proposed new high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham.

Before Christmas the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority took a 9.9% stake in Thames Water, while the Hong Kong-based tycoon Li Ka-shing acquired Northumbrian Water last year for just under $4bn (£2.6bn).

"The fact that people are still interested in water companies is a small positive [for listed UK water firms]," Angelos Anastasiou, an Investec analyst, said. "Over the medium term, there is potential [for more of such deals]."

Macquarie, the Australian bank that owns just under 40% of Kemble, said it had not diluted its holding and would not speculate on which shareholder inside its wider consortium of owners might have done so.

The Thames deal brings no new money into the business but CIC has $410bn in funds and is seen as a highly attractive new investor at a time when the water company needs to raise funds to renew parts of an ageing Victorian water and sewerage system.

In return, a holding in Thames offers CIC access to the stable returns offered by British water companies. High rates of inflation last year, from which British water operators are shielded by regulations governing price increases, highlighted the appeal of such companies to infrastructure investors seeking safe, predictable, long-term cash flows.

China has made no secret of its interest in buying plum European assets as the eurozone grapples with a debt crisis and countries such as Britain struggle to reduce escalating deficits.

Lou has previously said that China is keen to invest in outdated infrastructure in western countries, especially Britain, after previously concentrating on buying oil and mining assets in Africa.

Last November the state-owned China Three Gorges signed a deal to buy a stake in the top Portuguese utility EDP and the Chinese state shipping firm, COSCO, invested in Greece's biggest port in Piraeus.

Britain's infrastructure has long been targeted by more traditional foreign investors. The Spanish firm Ferrovial owns Heathrow and Stansted airports, EDF owns most of the UK's nuclear power stations and Germany's Deutsche Bahn recently bought the rail and bus operator Arriva. The ports company P&O, which owns UK assets at Tilbury and Southampton, was bought by the Dubai-based DP World in 2006. The Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation became the owner of MG Rover's Longbridge plant in Birmingham after a merger in late 2007 with its smaller rival Nanjing Automobile Group.

The cars are designed and assembled in the UK, from parts made in China.

Buying spree

The failure of energy companies to cut both gas and electricity tariffs means more than 8 million UK households will end up no better off. But there are still ways to save money

With Scottish Power joining the rest of the 'big six' energy firms and announcing a drop in energy prices – gas bills are to fall by 5% from 27 February – millions of households are set to benefit from cheaper energy bills.

When all the lower tariffs come into effect, the cheapest standard dual fuel deal among the major UK suppliers will be available from EDF Energy, costing households £1,129 over one year, followed by nPower at £1,152 and E.ON at £1,159 a year. Scottish & Southern Energy's (SSE) standard tariff will cost £1,167 a year, while Scottish Power customers will pay £1,169. British Gas will be the most expensive provider at £1,195.

A third of UK households will miss out on the recent round of price cuts completely, according to energyhelpline.com. It said 8.5 million of the UK's 26 million households will still be paying the same price than before the price cuts. This is due to the fact that none of the major suppliers has reduced both gas and electricity prices for customers. And the cuts will do little to wipe out the bill increases seen in 2011. Consumer Focus said almost 7 million households will remain in fuel poverty.

So which are the cheapest deals for domestic customers?

Dual fuel direct debit deal

First Utility is the cheapest dual fuel supplier in the UK, according to Moneysupermarket.com. Its iSave v9 deal costs an average of £1,030 a year, or as little as £1,004 in the east of England. However, First Utility customers only get the benefit of its cheap energy after 12 months because the firm pays back 13% of its customers' annual spend, capped at £80 for electricity and £100 for gas. The cheapest fixed dual fuel tariff is offered by Ovo Energy. Its New Energy Fixed tariff costs £1,059 a year for the average customer.

Gas and electricity separately

If consumers wish to unbundle their gas and electricity they can make a small saving on the cheapest dual fuel deal, with British Gas offering stand-alone electricity at £446 a year and EDF's best-buy gas at £676, according to Consumer Focus. This makes a combined total of £1,122 – £7 cheaper than the cheapest 'bix six' dual fuel offering, although this is still more than First Utility's best-buy dual fuel deal.

Away from British Gas, EDF is the next cheapest electricity provider costing £462 a year, followed by SSE at £467 and nPower at £472.

For gas, the cheapest supplier outside of EDF is nPower (from 1 February) at £690, followed by Scottish Power (from 27 February) at £695, SSE (from 26 March) at £700 and E.ON at £701.

Customers who do not want an online tariff

Customers who are shy of online deals should look to nPower's Flexsaver Feb 2013, according to the energyshop.com. This costs £1,123 on an annual average dual fuel tariff. Next cheapest is EDF Energy's standard dual fuel tariff at £1,129, according to uSwitch. It also suggests consumers look at fixing with OVO Energy on its New Energy Fixed tariff, which has an average bill size of £1,061.

Customers who don't want to fix

Households who wish to remain footloose and fancy free rather than tie themselves into a fixed deal should look at First Utility's iSave Dual Fuel V9, which costs an average £1,030.

Use the Guardian's switch and save tool to find the deals listed above

Scottish Power is only 'big six' firm yet to reduce prices as E.ON announces 6% cut to electricity bills from 27 February

E.ON has become the latest energy supplier to cut its prices, announcing a 6% reduction in electricity bills for 3.7 million customers.

The company said the cut, which does not come into effect until 27 February, would reduce the average annual bill by £31 and would benefit 75% of the households it supplies.

E.ON is the fifth of the big six energy suppliers to announce a cut, with only Scottish Power yet to do so. So far, none of the providers have reduced both gas and electricity bills, and cuts have been lower than the double-digit increases announced in 2011.

E.ON's UK chief executive, Dr. Tony Cocker, said falling wholesale energy prices had made the cut possible, but added: "Whilst we're pleased to pass on this recent slight fall in wholesale prices, most experts agree that global energy prices will continue their long-term rise."

Cocker said the energy industry needed to make changes to win back the trust of consumers. "At E.ON we have provided a lot of support and tailored advice to customers including practical help, such as putting in loft or cavity wall insulation, and financial help to those in most need. Over the coming months we will continue to help our customers to monitor their energy use and control their bills so they become energy fit."

He added: "No stone is being left unturned as we look at the products we offer, how we support our customers and how we make clear what goes into a bill."

Consumer Focus said once the cuts came into effect the average dual fuel customer would pay £1,159 a year with E.ON, making its standard tariff the third cheapest of the big six after EDF and nPower.

This latest cut means the focus is now on Scottish Power to cut its prices. Adam Scorer, Consumer Focus's director of policy and public affairs, said: "[Scottish Power's] customers will also be keen to see if the supplier will buck the trend and make deeper cuts or reductions across both gas and electricity given wholesale price falls in both."

Scorer welcomed the reductions, but said customers would still be paying a lot more for their energy than they were 12 months ago. "There is still a long way to go for suppliers to regain consumer trust. The next steps after these small price reductions will be for the industry to embrace Ofgem's market reforms. That should include buying and selling more of their energy on the open market, selling energy to small suppliers on reasonable terms, and being more transparent on their actual cost of energy."

As four of the Big Six announce cuts to energy bills, it's time to check if you are getting the cheapest deal

Consumers are being urged to check they are getting the best deal on their energy bills after four of the Big Six firms announced they were cutting prices. British Gas has cut electricity prices by 5%, while EDF Energy and nPower have announced that gas customers will get a 5% cut. Scottish & Southern Electricity has cut gas unit prices by 4.5%, but left its standing charge the same, reducing bills by 3.8%.

However, the price cuts only apply to the providers' standard tariffs, and other deals may offer better value.

According to figures from price comparison website Moneysupermarket, even after the cuts come into effect dual fuel customers on the standard tariff with these companies can save at least £200 by moving to the cheapest deal, an online tariff from First:utility called iSave v9. The average user on that deal will spend £1,030 a year, but that includes a discount of 13% paid at the end of 12 months.

The next cheapest deal, according to Moneysupermarket, is Scottish Power's Online Energy Saver 17, at £1,085 a year for the average consumer. The tariff offers 8.6% off the firm's standard charge for direct debit customers until 31 March 2013. There is a £50 charge if you want to switch.

Even if you want to stay on a standard tariff you might still be able to cut costs. Joe Malinowski of comparison site TheEnergyShop.com says that, even after the price cuts, the cheapest online deals offered by Scottish & Southern and British Gas will still be more expensive than EDF Energy's new standard tariff.

Despite the price cuts, many families are struggling with bills, and this week Citizens Advice is holding Big Energy Week to encourage those in difficulty to take advice. The charity's chief executive, Gillian Guy, says: "Anyone who is looking to save money on their energy bills; needs advice on fuel debt or wants to check that they're getting all their help available can go along to any Citizens Advice Bureaux."