Fujitsu has opened a £44m energy-efficient data centre in the UK which it says will contribute towards saving enough electricity each year to power up to 6,000 homes. The centre was announced last August and is designed to address the shortage of data storage in London. Located 35 miles from the capital, the site will serve customers in the UK and Europe, giving them increased capacity without the need to build their own facilities. “Fujitsu’s new data centre combines high resilience and high efficiency, which is difficult to achieve,” said Martin Provoost, head of data centres at Fujitsu Services. “Attaining high resilience requires more redundant infrastructure, which in turn consumes more energy. “However, through new technology, Fujitsu’s data centre achieves the optimum resilience level and a leading efficiency rating.” The centre’s new features will save enough electricity to power 2,000 households a year, Fujitsu said. These features include evaporation towers that remove heat more efficiently than air-conditioning systems, and heat pumps that reuse heat from other areas. It also uses a more energy-efficient uninterruptible power supply to maintain the electricity in case of power failure.

Businesses across the country are heading into annual negotiations with their power suppliers, facing the prospect of a 100% rise in their annual bills. About half of UK small and mid-sized firms strike annual energy contracts that expire in October, and are beginning to enter talks about new deals. Wholesale electricity prices for this winter have jumped to more than £90 per megawatt hour, according to figures – an increase of 110% on last winter. Gas prices have jumped 130% over the same period. The soaring costs, which are hammering company finances across the length and breadth of the country, provide further evidence of the inflationary pressures on the economy. Even some household names are complaining about soaring power bills, behind closed doors. Tesco has seen all the financial advantages of an eight-year programme to halve its power consumption through green initiatives wiped out by soaring prices. James Griffin, a director of Star, an internet services company that employs 250 people in Gloucester, London and Manchester, said energy costs made up 30% of his total overheads. His energy bills had jumped 70% in the past 18 months, with his three data centres alone now consuming £1.5m worth of electricity a year. “I used to worry about how much revenue I could generate from each of my servers,” said Griffin. “Now I worry about how much I can squeeze out of each unit of power.” Griffin’s fears reflect the experience of firms across the UK. One chain of six small car dealerships in South Yorkshire has seen its electricity bill jump to £60,000 a year, from £30,000 a year ago. A specialist baker in Surrey, producing muffins and cakes, has seen its bill jump from £250,000 to £500,000 – the firm has already been hit by soaring wheat costs. A car-parts manufacturer in Manchester, meanwhile, has seen its power bill climb from £70,000 to £160,000.

BG Group Plc, the U.K.’s third- largest oil and gas producer, said oil prices are too high to be sustained. “The current prices, if you look at the underlying long run marginal cost of oil production, are too high to be sustained,” BG Chief Executive Officer Frank Chapman told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “There is a good deal of speculative anxiety because of geopolitical effects, holding the price up.” Crude oil has more than doubled in the past year to a record $142.99 a barrel in New York on June 27th. The price of oil will climb to $170 a barrel before year’s end because of the declining dollar and political conflicts, OPEC President Chakib Khelil predicted yesterday. “We’re screening projects still down as far as $30 a barrel. We think around mid-fifties is a price that could be sustained if you take away all of the anxiety,” Chapman said. “We have to make sure that our investments are taking account of that low case as well as looking at what might happen in a high case.” BG is offering A$13.8 billion ($13.3 billion) in its hostile bid for Origin Energy Ltd., Australia’s biggest producer of gas from coal seams. “It’s a very good business, an extremely well-run business and we would like to add that to BG’s portfolio and pursue all those businesses, retail, power generation and the coal seam gas business,” said Chapman.

Homeowners could be forced to improve the energy efficiency of their properties under Government plans, it has been reported.

Proposals to be announced in a renewable energy strategy next week include new powers requiring people to reduce their carbon footprint when they renovate their homes, a newspaper has claimed.

It said one in four properties could be installed with solar heating equipment.

Other compulsory measures could include replacing oil-fired boilers.

The new onus on householders is part of £100bn package which would also see thousands new offshore wind farms built and a massive tree-planting drive.

The ideas are set out in a consultation document to be published by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in response to climate change.

The Government wants to reduce increase the proportion of energy from renewable sources to 15% by 2020.

A spokeswoman confirmed that the Government would be announcing an expansion of renewables next week but declined to comment on details which were yet to be published.

Significant increases in gas and electricity prices are “very likely” in the coming period, energy minister Malcolm Wicks said. Mr Wicks put the blame for domestic energy price hikes on massive increases in the cost of oil, gas and coal on global markets. His comments came after reports that unnamed industry sources believe household energy bills could increase by as much as 40% this winter. Mr Wicks did not confirm the reported rises, which it is claimed could add £400 to a family’s bills. Asked if he recognised the figure, he said in an interview: “There are estimates and guesstimates and guesses. Let’s see what happens.” He added: “Yes, I’m worried about the scale of it. I can’t give you a figure because actually, with respect to all the experts, no-one knows. “Clearly, given the price of a barrel of oil and also the rising wholesale cost of coal and gas, it is very, very likely that we are going to see significant increases in the future. “This is a global issue. It’s affecting not just Britain but all countries and we have got to tackle it on a number of fronts.” Mr Wicks rejected claims that the UK was facing particular difficulties with energy bills. “Our prices for electricity are still lower than in many parts of Europe,” he said. “Over the last 12 years we have had lower costs compared with Europe, so the idea that there is something peculiar about Britain, frankly, is good polemic, but it is not evidence-based.”

Household energy bills could increase by as much as 40% this winter, the BBC has learned, as oil and wholesale gas prices hit record highs. The increases could mean households paying £400 more a year on average for their gas and electricity, senior industry sources have said. The increase is far more than analysts have predicted in recent months. It would put more pressure on homeowners already struggling with higher food and fuel costs. Announcements are most likely to come in August, when energy bills are not at the forefront of people’s minds, says BBC business correspondent Nils Blythe. There is a great reluctance in the industry to be the first to reveal a big rise, so the rises may be unveiled in stages, our correspondent adds. The prediction from senior sources in the energy industry is the highest yet. However, some analysts forecast the increases will be nearer 25%. The news comes on the same day that Chancellor Alistair Darling called for restraint in pay settlements to prevent the UK falling into an “inflationary spiral”. However, Dave Prentis, general secretary of the public sector union Unison, warned that a large rise in energy bills would have a “massive effect” on his workers and could lead to some pay negotiations being reopened. “We reached a three-year agreement in health at Easter when the retail prices index [measure of inflation] was much lower than it is now,” he said. “If prices continue to spiral, that health agreement will be opened and if the government says we are not going to, then we will take industrial action,” Mr Prentis said. According to Capital Economics, a 40% jump in gas and electricity bills would add 1% to the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation, which currently stands at 4.3%.

Last month, Centrica – which owns the UK’s biggest energy provider, British Gas – signalled that gas prices for customers could increase again in 2008, as it was being squeezed by rising wholesale prices. According to industry watchers Platts, the wholesale price of gas has risen 74% since the start of the year, with gas to be supplied in winter 2008 hitting a record high last week. The wholesale gas price is closely linked to the price of oil, which itself hit a record high of just under $140 a barrel this month. In January, a barrel of oil cost $100.

Consumers could be hit by energy price rises of up to 40 per cent this year as power companies struggle to maintain profitability in the face of a trebling in wholesale gas prices. Leading market analysts said yesterday that an increase of that magnitude would drive average UK energy bills from £1,048 at present to £1,467 within seven months. John Hall, an adviser on energy issues to industrial and corporate clients representing 15 per cent of the UK commercial gas and electricity market, said that Britain’s six major energy suppliers would need to raise prices by between 30 and 40 per cent this year to maintain margins.

Wholesale gas prices, which are linked to global oil prices, have increased nearly threefold in a year from 36.35p per therm in June last year to 94.54p yesterday. They briefly touched record highs of about 105p per therm earlier this month. Crude oil prices have also touched a record of nearly $140 a barrel this week. Mr Hall said: “Unless there is a dramatic fall in oil prices, that is the scale of increase we are talking about to ensure that energy companies keep their margins.” Britain’s power companies are gearing up for a fresh round of price rises, the first of which could come as early as next month. Mr Hall predicted that a staggered increase, with one in the summer and another in late autumn or early winter, assuming wholesale prices remain at current levels, is likelier than a single increase, which would trigger a huge public outcry.

Peter Atherton, utilities analyst for Citigroup, agreed that power companies will need to consider price rises of 30 per cent-plus this year if they expect to maintain reasonable profit margins from retail distribution. However, he expected that the public outcry that would result from such big rises would lead companies to accept very low profits from their supply businesses this year and to balance that against higher earnings from power generation.

The warnings came yesterday as MPs accused Ofgem, the energy regulator, of being a toothless tiger that did not do enough to help consumers in the face of soaring energy prices.

At a Commons committee hearing, Lindsay Hoyle, Labour MP for Chorley, made a stinging attack on Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem’s chief executive. Mr Hoyle said that energy companies blamed poor planning laws for not building enough storage facilities to enable Britain to be self-sufficient but he said that it was in the companies’ interests not to tackle the problem since they stood to benefit from passing on the higher prices to consumers.

Mr Hoyle asked Mr Buchanan whether he was prepared to act now to address the issue, adding: “Or are you the toothless tiger that we imagined?”

Citigroup’s analyst thought the likeliest pricing scenario is a rise in retail prices of up to 25 per cent, which would lead to extremely thin or zero profits from retail power supply.

However, not all energy companies are in a position to do that easily. Some companies, such as E.ON, have substantial generation capacity. Others, such as Centrica, the owner of British Gas, are particularly exposed to wholesale price rises because they lack their own generation capacity.

Patrick Herren, an independent energy market analyst, said about half the cost of a household’s gas bill and one third of the cost of an electricity bill was the commodity cost of the gas itself, with the rest being made up of transport and distribution costs.

Moreover, National Grid expects gas output from the North Sea to fall 11 per cent this winter, significantly more than expected. More gas will need to be shipped to the UK from overseas as liquefied natural gas. That will put the UK in direct competition with Japan and South Korea, which are entirely dependent on LNG imports and pay top global prices.