THE GREAT electricity price rip-off persists, ensuring that households in mid and north Wales continue to receive bills hundreds of pounds higher than they should be based on the fuel mixes used in power-generation.

The regions’ many homes without mains gas, and which therefore use more electricity, are particularly badly affected. People in the south Wales area, which includes parts of Ceredigion and Powys, and the whole of Carmarthenshire, are almost as badly hit.

In April, I pointed out that a huge 40 per cent increase in the price of household electricity in mid and north Wales is almost three times higher than it should be given that the bulk of electricity - about 63 per cent - now comes from cheap renewables - wind, solar photovoltaic and hydro, and from nuclear plants, biomass and coal.

The remaining 37 per cent or so is generated by gas power stations. And here’s where we should be getting more than a little indignant. Because electricity bills are being artificially, and seriously, inflated as a result of a little-known, and increasingly illogical, wholesale market convention that allows gas - the most expensive fuel - to set the price for all generation.

Rishi Sunak’s emergency cash aid over soaring household energy bills will provide some temporary relief for the substantial number of households in rural Wales - about 21 per cent in Ceredigion alone - on such low incomes they are unable to keep homes adequately warm.

But determined political intervention is urgently needed to end this gas-is-king anomaly, which otherwise will continue to overshadow domestic electricity supply pricing.

Rubbing salt in this particular wound is the fact that gas power-station owners have not only been excluded, so far, from Sunak’s 25 per cent energy windfall tax, but that they have been making mountainous gains. One of the biggest, SSE, has said its profits rose to £1.5 billion last year after its gas-fired plants cashed in on high prices.

The fundamental point, however, is that the cockeyed industry practice that allows gas to set the price for all generation - highly ironically known as the ‘merit order’ - must be scrapped, especially now that the electricity system is powered predominantly not by gas but by renewables and nuclear.

This is something Ceredigion MP Ben Lake may like to get his teeth into. Already, he is pushing for a range of measures aimed at making energy more affordable for vulnerable people.

In addition, he needs to be keenly aware of the pricing injustice wrapped up in Ofgem’s “energy” cap hike in April, which resulted in household electricity prices in rural Wales rising on average by a monumental 40 per cent.

If we hadn’t been clobbered by the ill-named ‘merit order’, the increase would instead have been about 14 per cent. For Ben’s constituents, that would have translated into savings of around £400 or £500 a year.

Not to be sniffed at.

CLIMATE change minister Julie James continues to try to slide out of a solemn commitment last year to fund desperately urgent attempts to save Wales’s curlews from extinction within 10 years.

She knows very well that the Welsh government is under international obligations to protect this marvellous and characterful bird, with its distinctive downward-curving bill. Last November, she promised funding to back crucial work to halt its dire decline.

Five weeks after this column urged her to keep to her word, she continues to vacillate.

Mick Green, the expert ornithologist and wildlife campaigner leading efforts to save Wales’s curlews, tells me: “We welcomed the minister’s words of support, but these must be translated into immediate action and funding on the ground.

“Extinction does not wait for civil service inertia. We have already lost one breeding season without funding since the launch of the recovery plan last November – we need decisions and action now.

“Natural Resources Wales is not fit for purpose. It should be run by ecologists, but instead we have bean-counters with no knowledge of how the natural world works. I pity my colleagues on the ground in NRW who are desperately trying to get things done despite the best efforts of management.

“For NRW to propose tree planting on known curlew habitats is a travesty and probably unlawful. It is an example of its lack of joined up ecological thinking.”