British homes will send an average of £5,700 abroad to foreign gas producers to heat their homes and water and cook food by the middle of the next decade, new analysis suggests.
The average home could be buying foreign gas worth around £500 a year by 2035, unless efforts are made to reduce the country’s dependency on gas.
The Energy and Climate Change Intelligence Unit (ECIU) said that it would not be possible to avoid this by producing more gas domestically, as the UK’s North Sea reserves are dwindling.
Instead to get off foreign gas, Britain will need to speed up the deployment of renewable power, insulate homes and install heat pumps which run on electricity.
Without this, it warned homes across the country will become even more dependent on imported gas to function.
The UK currently imports around half its gas, but that could rise to 85% by 2035 without the alternatives, the ECIU said.
The perils of relying heavily on imported fossil fuels became clear last year after Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine.
Russian gas supplies to continental Europe dried up following the invasion, pushing prices up more than tenfold at times. European countries were also worried that they could run out of gas if they faced an unusually cold winter.
As it turned out the winter was mild. The UK did not get much of its gas directly from Russia.
Read more: DailyMile
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