Gordon Parsons has featured in an interesting article in the Telegraph today. Parsons is the commercial managing director of nPower. He states that the carbon economy is here to stay and that power companies will die if they do not encourage comapnies and people to change the way they consume. He believes that the cost of energy must rise but players must use less of it. This is a powerful argument and if we look over the last five years we have seen growing costs which have reflected the carbon market, but we have also seen record profits within the Utilities and growing demand. In fact over the last five years we have seen highest growth in demand since the early 1980's when computing was in growth. Clearly, the hotter it gets the more air conditioning we are putting in and the flatter the price between Summer and Winter.

Parsons advocates a change in usage, but he is danger of being a little hypocritical, the Power companies have only introduced biomass to new build coal stations because it makes them money, and they have limited it to 10%. If it was 20% the efficiencies would drop and the price of production would increase despite a reduction in carbon produced. It is too easy for power companies to tell the consumers to change and the supplier can help in the process. The help is chargeable!