Your gas went up 24%.
Your electricity went up 5%.
Same country, same month, same cap. One fuel went up nearly five times faster than the other. This is not a rounding quirk. It is the most important number in British energy right now, and it should probably change what you buy next.
🚢 Gas has a passport
Gas is a commodity that gets loaded onto ships. Those ships go wherever the money is. When something goes wrong anywhere on the planet, every buyer competes for the same cargoes and the price goes up for all of them.
It does not matter that Britain buys most of its gas from Norway and the North Sea. You are bidding against Japan and Germany for the marginal cargo, and the marginal cargo sets the price for everything.
This is why your boiler is quietly exposed to geopolitics. It has been for decades. Most people only notice in the bad years.
🌬️ Wind does not have a spot price
Electricity is different because a growing share of it is made from things that have no fuel cost at all.
Nobody invoices a wind farm for wind. Nobody sends a bill to a solar panel. Once the thing is built, the marginal cost of the next unit is close to zero, forever.
Gas still sets the electricity price in a lot of hours, which is why electricity moved at all. But the more hours that wind and solar cover, the fewer hours gas gets to set the price, and the more your electricity bill detaches from the news.
🔮 The gap is the trend
24% versus 5% is not a one-off. It is the direction of travel, and it will keep widening.
Which quietly reframes the heat pump question. The argument for one is usually made on efficiency, and the numbers are fine but not thrilling.
The stronger argument is that a heat pump moves your heating out of the fuel that is exposed to wars and into the fuel that is exposed to weather. British weather is many things. It is not a cartel.
Every year the electricity system gets a bit more insulated from other people's arguments, and every year the gas system does not. You cannot control which side of that gap the country ends up on. You can absolutely control which side your house is on.