British Gas has taken the unprecedented step of opening an emergency helpline to deal with complaints about direct debits following the adverse publicity over the excessive charges that have been made on customers’ accounts. British Gas, the largest energy company in the UK, has called in 300 staff to address problems with energy payments.

According to today’s paper, the Mail on Sunday has been contacted by 1,500 readers worried that they are being compelled to keep excessively large credit balances on their accounts because of the way the energy companies calculate direct debit charges.

Although British Gas, which has 16million customers, receives the largest number of complaints concerns have been raised about all of the other major UK suppliers including E.ON, Scottish & Southern, Scottish Power, nPower and EDF.

Managing director Phil Bentley disputed the estimates that the average customer has a credit balance of more than £100 and also pays hundreds of pounds in advance for gas, providing the industry with a cash balance which may be as much as £4billion.  Mr Bentley maintains that British Gas customers go into winter with an average credit balance of £6.50.

Mr Bentley defended direct debits, arguing that most consumers like to spread their bills.

Mr Bentley said that he would welcome an Ofgem investigation, and argued that the meters of British Gas customers were read regularly so payments  are closely related to actual usage.

Mr Bentley said that many customers who complained about direct debits simply did not understand the increase in underlying energy costs.

Mr Bentley explained: ‘If consumption goes up, then their bill price will rise, but the cost per therm should not exceed the agreed maximum.

Mr Bentley pledged that by the end of next year customers would automatically be sent a cheque if the surplus on their account topped £200.

Cases of refunds taking up to five months have been reported, but Mr Bentley said the that the aim was to transfer large surpluses within 28 days.

The emergency number for those trying to sort out direct debits is 0800 048 0101, and telephone lines are open from 10am to 8pm.

It was a deal to make Alistair Darling hug himself with glee. Just as the world’s existing financial markets were hitting a five-year low two weeks ago, the Treasury raked in a cool £54m from a brand new one. The occasion was Britain’s first auction of CO2 permits. Almost 4m were knocked down to greenhouse gas emitters in a sale that was four times oversubscribed. The government expects to sell 80m more over the next four years, raising a further £1 billion.

The plan, at first glance, seems simplicity itself: by charging companies for the , the government hopes to encourage them to switch to cleaner andright to emit CO2 greener technologies. It is the latest development in a global campaign to save the planet by making polluters pay.

We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen. Last year alone, permits worth more than £55 billion were traded on the world’s carbon markets – but future trading volumes, if all goes global according to plan, will dwarf these.

Carbon trading schemes originate from the Kyoto protocol on climate change agreed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1997. Governments adhering to Kyoto accept limits on the CO2 their countries can emit. To meet their pledges, they put caps on the carbon outputs of domestic companies, which have to buy annual permits to exceed them.

Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders, who, naturally, charge a commission. For the City the arrival of carbon trading is a bonanza. The sector already employs about 3,000 people and has created a few dozen new millionaires.

Several such schemes are up and running around the world: Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme, founded in 2005, is the biggest, but others are following in Australia, the US and even China.

It sounds good news for everyone: governments, taxpayers, City boys and the environment. The reality is a great deal less rosy – indeed some of those closest to the carbon markets say openly that the system is doomed to failure.

Many carbon traders believe they could make the system work but fear the politicians who oversee it will never dare put a sufficiently high price on carbon emissions to make a difference.

Those millions collected by the Treasury, for example, came mainly from UK power companies, and the cost will be added directly to our bills, as will the cost of annual CO2 permits in future. More worrying still, carbon trading shows no sign of achieving its purpose: CO2 emissions have increased, not slackened, since the first trading schemes. What, then, is the point? Good question, particularly for the 10,000 politicians, policy-makers and civil servants arriving this week in Poznan, Poland, for the latest round of global climate negotiations. They will consider a proposal to make carbon trading one of the world’s main tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.

The incongruity of proposing that a brand new financial market might be able to save the world – when faith in every other kind of financial market is tumbling – needs no underlining. But there are plenty of other reasons for scepticism, too.

Jim Hansen, director of the Nasa God-dard space centre and a renowned critic of global measures to combat climate change, believes carbon trading is a “terrible” approach. “Carbon trading does not solve the emission problem at all,” he says. “In fact it gives industries a way to avoid reducing their emissions. The rules are too complex and it creates an entirely new class of lobbyists and fat cats.”

Even some of those involved in setting up the carbon markets fear they will fail in their principal aim of cutting carbon emissions. Liz Bossley of CEAG, a City consultant in carbon trading, may have helped the fledgling system to grow from nothing into a big business but she is frank about its limitations. “The fatal flaw is . . . the politicians, because they set the cap which determines the supply of CO2 credits,” she says.

“The problem is that making those caps tough enough to achieve real cuts in CO2 emissions would have all kinds of political consequences. The chances of any politician taking such a decision are negligible.” What Bossley means is that consumers – voters – have to foot the bill when the cost of permits turns up in domestic energy prices.

British consumers are already paying about £60 extra each year on their gas and electricity bills to support renewable energy. Will they take more of this medicine in the middle of the worst recession for dec-ades? Nervous politicians remember the backlash in 2000 when angry lorry drivers almost brought the country to a standstill over the fuel accelerator tax.

There’s more. Under the 1997 Kyoto deal the main 37 industrialised nations (but not America) agreed that one of the ways they could cut emissions was by financing “clean development” projects in the developing world.

The idea is certainly appealing: if a company is emitting too much CO2 it can either make cuts or pay other companies to cut their emissions instead. If it turns out to be cheaper to pay someone in China to plant a forest to absorb carbon dioxide, or a factory in India to install clean technology to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases, then this is allowed, provided the project has been approved under the UN framework convention on climate change. For each tonne of CO2 saved, the convention issues a certified emission reduction certificate, or CER. These are valuable: indeed, they are the nearest thing to currency that the carbon markets acknowledge. Each one is worth about £14.

The original plan was to create a system for transferring wealth from developed countries such as Britain and America to the Third World, hence killing two birds with one stone: cutting emissions and helping international development.

It certainly sounded good – but the reality is the most complex trading system the world has known.

The complexity naturally means the system is open to abuse. Last year The Sunday Times revealed how SRF, an Indian company that produces refrigeration gases at a sprawling chemical plant in Rajasthan, stood to make £300m from selling certificates to overseas companies including Shell and Barclays. The Indian company had spent just £1.4m on equipment to reduce its emissions – and was using the profit to expand production of another greenhouse gas, a thousand times more . Other manufacturers damaging than CO2 in India and China producing similar products are expected to earn an estimated £3.3 billion over the next six years by cutting emissions at a cost of just £67m.

Internal papers leaked from the UN show that such problems arose because the system for checking companies involved in emissions reductions schemes was seriously flawed. One official estimated that up to 20% of the carbon credits issued did not represent genuine reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This meant that the real effect of the system had been to increase the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Nor is this all. One of the unintended consequences of the carbon trading system is a potentially huge – and massively destabilising – transfer of money and influence from the industrialised West to Russia. This is because when the Kremlin signed up to the Kyoto treaty it was given an annual emissions limit based on the horrors pumped out by filthy old Soviet industries back in 1990. Since then Russia’s industrial base has contracted so drastic-ally that it uses only a fraction of its allowances. One recent analyst’s report found that Russia has accumulated emissions permits worth about four billion tonnes of CO2. The report warned: “Russia must be singled out as a potential threat to the ability of the market to produce a meaning-ful carbon price.”

There is of course another huge incongruity in Russia, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of coal, gas and oil, also in effect having control of the system for reducing emissions from these fossil fuels. It means that the West could end up paying the Russians for fuel – and then paying them again for the right to burn it.

Undeterred by these fundamental flaws, the UN is planning many more CER schemes. About 4,000 are awaiting approval, including plans for capturing methane from Indian chicken farms, Filipino pig farms and Thai coal mines. Other schemes propose destroying industrial gases at factories in China and India and cutting CO2 emissions by building wind farms in Mon-golia. One of the ideas under discussion in Poznan could result in European industry paying millions of pounds to landowners in Brazil and Indonesia not to cut down their rainforests.

It is easy to mock such schemes but the mockery hides from view the really big question, and the one that is hardest to answer: are the emerging carbon markets capable of making a significant dent in the world’s surging carbon emissions?

Lord May, a former government chief scientist, is now an influential member of the British government’s climate change committee, whose inaugural report (Building a Low-Carbon Economy – the UK’s Contribution to Tackling Climate Change) will be published tomorrow.

The report will include a full scientific and economic analysis of how Britain can achieve its target of cutting emissions by 80% by 2050, including specific reduction targets for each of the UK’s first three five-year “carbon budget” periods. Although the report will support carbon trading as a possible means of reducing emissions, May has warned that the system risks creating a false sense of security.

Speaking at the Royal Society last month, he said: “The [inclusion of] these fiscal instruments could give the misleading impression that they can deliver real emissions reductions. Sooner or later, people are going to have to realise that, in climate change, we now face something far worse than world war two.”

Some of his fellow scientists even warn that governments may soon have to accept that combating climate change is becoming incompatible with economic growth. A recent peer-reviewed paper from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the government’s leading academic research centre for global warming, warned: “Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonisation, it is difficult to foresee anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilising the climate.”

At the Royal Society, Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre, spelt it out: “The target set for the climate talks was to keep global temperature rises below 2C. At the moment, however, the level of emissions is rising so fast that we are heading for a world that is 4-5C warmer than now by 2100. That would be catastrophic for the environment and for humanity.”

In other words, if the scientists are right, all our efforts to fight off the recession are wrongheaded. We should be embracing it. So where does this leave the world leaders and their Sherpas, heading for Poznan with their hopes set on trading our way out of the abyss? Anderson’s answer is a shrug.

“Carbon trading may have been the answer once but not any more,” he says. “It will just take too long to achieve anything, and we no longer have the luxury of time.”

Stinking rich

For clever City boys, carbon markets are a marvellous way of turning muck into brass. Daniel Co, a Filipino pig farmer, used to shovel the dung from his 10,000 animals into ponds on his Uni-Rich Agro Industrial farm. The manure generated thousands of tons of methane, a global warming gas, but Co did not want to spend £110,000 on kit to trap the gas.

Then EcoSecurities, a British carbon trading firm, worked out that anything that captured the methane would entitle the farmer annually to nearly 3,000 “certified emission reductions” – the nearest thing to a carbon trading currency.

EcoSecurities did the paperwork for Co and gave him just over £2 per certificate. He put in the methane-capture kit, generating power and saving about £24,000 a year in utility bills. EcoSecurities sells the CERs for about £10 each to a French bank, which sells them on to power plants that need to offset emissions. The consumer pays through higher bills. A nice little earner for everyone except the poor mugs (us) at the end of the chain – but can it save the planet?

German energy group E.ON said on Thursday it hopes to cut bills for its UK customers in 2009 if wholesale gas and electricity prices carry on falling. “If we continue to see falling wholesale electricity and gas prices, we’d hope to reduce customers’ prices as soon as we are able next year,” E.ON UK Chief Executive Paul Golby said in a statement. “We’re obviously very aware of the difficulties our customers are experiencing, especially considering the current economic problems, and we’re monitoring wholesale prices closely in the hope of making this move.” E.ON employs about 17,000 people in the UK and its British retail business has 5.5 million electricity and gas customers. It said it was also introducing more measures to help customers struggling to pay their bills.

Consumers who were expecting significant falls in their energy bills over the next few years – which have risen by more than 40% in 2008 – could be disappointed, Alistair Buchanan, the chief executive of Ofgem, told an influential group of MPs.  Britain does not have enough storage capacity to buy and hoard gas when it is cheap, and the credit crisis has delayed projects which would have improved the situation. To make matters worse, the financial turmoil means that gas and electricity wholesale companies are now demanding a higher deposit for energy because they are worried that their customers – the retail distributors – will not have enough money to honour their commitments in the future. Mr Buchanan told the Business and Enterprise Select Committee on Energy that gas companies were being charged considerably more by their banks to borrow money.

“Companies are having to decide how much of this should be pushed through to consumers. This is very, very frightening,” he said. His comments will come as a severe blow to hard-pressed consumers, who have had to cope with a series of bills increasing this year. The average joint gas and electricity bill has jumped from £912 at the start of the year to £1,303. While the cut in Value Added Tax, announced this week by Alistair Darling, will bring down some bills, it will not affect energy bills, which incur a VAT rate of just 5 per cent. Most experts predicted that energy bills would start to come down in 2009 because of recent heavy falls in the gas wholesale market. However, Mr Buchanan warned that customers might fail to see much long-term reduction in their bills, because of gas companies escalating costs.

“Our British utility companies have significant refinancing to achieve in the next 18 months. They are very healthy companies but they have to refinance their debt,” Mr Buchanan said.

Peter Luff, the Conservative chair of the Committee said afterwards: “This has to hit consumers. It has to. They will be puzzled to see oil prices tumbling and no reduction in their gas bills, but the forward gas market remains ahead [of the current price] throughout 2010 and 2011.” Most gas companies buy their energy on the ‘forward market’, which allows them to purchase contracts at a set price in the future. According to energy consultants ICIS Heren, the price of wholesale gas in summer 2009 is 49.87p, but rises to 53.5p in summer 2010 and to 55.p in 2011.

Though this price has fallen very sharply since the peak they reached this summer, Ed Cox at the company said, “They remain very high in historical terms compared to a few years ago. “The era of cheap energy is very much over.” Most experts agree that consumers will never see prices return to where they were five years ago, when the average gas and electricity bill for a family was nearly half its current level – at just £534 a year.

Mr Luff agreed that forward gas prices had calmed down since the summer – which could see suppliers trim their bills in the New Year. But, in the longer-term in the UK, the cost of energy was much more expensive than both Europe and America. “In the past Europe set a ceiling for prices, now it sets a floor,” he said. According to figures submitted to the committee the forward price of gas in 2011 is lower in Europe by at least 5 pence a therm, and even lower in America.

He blamed the lack of storage capacity for imported gas. Britain can store between 10 and 12 days’ worth of gas, compared with an average of 70 days’ worth of storage in Europe.

Various projects to increase capacity in this country have run into trouble because of the credit crisis. Portland Gas, which was planning a major facility in Dorset, admitted earlier this month that it will be seriously delayed. Not only will consumers need to get used to annal energy bills of well above £1,000, business users will be very heavily hit. Jeremy Nicholson, the chief executive of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents glass, paper, chemical and brick factories, all of whom consume vast quantities of energy, said: “Britain is no longer competitive with Europe and the gap has widened in recent years, despite repeated protestations from Ofgem and ministers that the problem will sort itself out.

“Everyone will be hit by these high forward energy prices – consumers and businesses.”

Mr Buchanan defended himself from accusations by Committee members that the regulator was a “toothless tiger”.

“We are quite comfortable giving the industry a good kicking,” he said. He also promised to investigate why so many customers, who pay their bills by direct debit, were in credit to their energy suppliers.

Regulator Ofgem is considering an investigation into rising direct debit demands from energy companies. The move comes after an MP said firms were raising direct debit payments when people were in credit to boost cash flow. The industry denied this. Pressure is building on energy firms to cut household bills after they raised prices twice during 2008. The head of regulator Ofgem has told MPs that he expects to see prices drop for customers early in the New Year.  The average annual household gas and electricity bill rose by more than £300 during 2008.  Now some of the direct debit customers of the bigger lenders say they are having to pay more in recent months.

Millions of people pay their gas and electricity bills by direct debit, but many are unclear how much they should be paying each month to ensure they clear the amount due on their bills. Conservative MP Peter Luff, chairman of the Business and Enterprise Select Committee, said firms had been raising direct debit payments even when customers’ accounts were in credit and warned this practice might be widespread. An Ofgem spokesman said there was “no quantified evidence indicating misuse of direct debit schemes” but, after receiving information from consumers, it was considering whether to investigate.

But earlier this week the Energy Retail Association, which speaks for suppliers, strongly denied the claim that this was designed to boost companies’ cash flow.

“What energy companies are trying to do is make sure you get a balanced account that is zero or as close to zero as possible after you’ve had the biggest bill,” said Russell Hamblin-Boone from the trade body.

Energy companies have come under pressure to lower bills after recent falls in the wholesale prices of gas and electricity. In his pre-Budget report speech on Monday, Chancellor Alistair Darling acknowledged “widespread concern” that these wholesale price changes were not being reflected quickly enough in falling household bills.

He announced that Ofgem would produce a report every three months on price changes.

The government would step in if there was evidence of “unfair gaps” in pricing between different payment methods, such as pre-payment meters and direct debit customers, he said.

British Gas announced on Tuesday that it was narrowing the price between pre-payment meter bills and other forms of payment.

This would lead to a £22 average cut in the annual bill of a dual fuel pre-payment meter customer. Electricity customers with British Gas will pay the same as the quarterly cash or cheque tariff.

Ofgem chief executive Alistair Buchanan told the Business and Energy Select Committee on Tuesday that the regulator was putting as much pressure as it could on all the major suppliers to make announcements soon on bills.

He repeated the regulator’s view that there was no evidence of any price-fixing cartel among the major suppliers. None of the major suppliers have dropped prices recently, after all the “big six” put bills up to reflect wholesale costs earlier in the year.Earlier this month, the UK’s second-biggest energy company, Scottish and Southern Energy, said it was “optimistic” that domestic prices could be cut early in 2009 if wholesale gas and electricity prices continued their downward trend. Smaller supplier, First:Utility, which has 6,000 customers, said on Monday that it was dropping its prices in response to falling wholesale costs.

The study, which was carried out by Capgemini, a global energy consultancy firm, also claims that electricity generation has fallen to its lowest level in ten years. The shortage has been caused by the increase in the level of demand for energy combined with a growing tendency to build wind turbines, at the expense of other, more reliable, electricity sources, it says. The report estimates that around one quarter of the UK’s energy plant capacity will close by 2015 as the country struggles to balance its carbon emissions targets with production of new energy sources. An added problem is that Britain is moving from being self-sufficient in oil and gas as North Sea production declines, the report states. In 2005, the UK became a net importer of gas. By 2010, imports could account for 40 per cent of British gas needs; by 2020, 80 per cent to 90 per cent. Nuclear reactors currently account for about 20 per cent of Britain’s electricity, but this will shrink to 6 per cent in 20 years as ageing plants are closed down. A spokesman for Capgemini said that unless new power stations are built “the lights will go out”. He added: “Last year the system very nearly ran out of power and situation is still very tight. We have a large number of power stations that are going to close between now and 2015. “There are stations that are planned to replace them but these stations are being built fairly slowly and the planned output of the new power stations will not necessarily cover those that are closing. “We still have time to sort this out but over the next few years we may well be facing a shortage of energy.” The report also warned that the credit crunch had slowed down investment into utilities infrastructure across Europe and warned that governments should expect a “difficult wake up” once the recession is over. It estimates that an investment of at least 1 trillion euros (£790 billion) is needed across the continent over the next 25 years.

Last year a report by Logica CMG, a business consultancy firm, warned that demand for energy could outstrip supply by almost one quarter within eight years. The loss to the economy could be £108 billion each year, it said. It comes just a fortnight after energy experts warned that Britain faces blackouts within ten years as power stations go out of service. They claimed that government dithering had failed to guarantee the construction of new plants. Nine oil and coal-fired power plants are to close by 2015 because of an EU directive that aims to limit pollution. At the same time, four ageing nuclear power plants will also be shut.

Dr Jon Gibbins, of Imperial College and many other industry experts are concerned the UK is becoming increasingly reliant on imported gas, which can show sudden price hikes. It also puts Britain at the mercy of gas rich states in the Middle East and Russia, which is increasingly flexing its muscles as the world’s first energy super-power. Dr Gibbins said it is vital that Britain has a diverse source of electricity, from nuclear, renewable sources, such as wind power, and coal fired power stations where the carbon emissions are captured and stored under ground. Dr Gibbins was one of 31 experts quizzed on the issue by BBC News. The Government is aiming to cover 20 per cent of electricity needs from renewable energy sources such as wind and wave power by 2020. This would require a multi-billlion pound investment which does not appear to be forthcoming, the experts said. Energy minister Michael O’Brien insisted the UK is building sufficient new power stations. He pointed to the fact that the French company EDF is committed to spending £12.5billion on delivering new nuclear power stations.

You’ve heard of solar power and wind power to generate electricity. Now get ready for people power - it’s being generated at a Connecticut gym where exercise is being turned into energy. From the energetic instructor to the sweaty riders, everything looks like it should in a typical spin class at Ridgefield Fitness Club. But the riders aren’t just burning energy, they’re creating it. The club is the first in its area with new technology called “Green Revolution,” a system that allows the club to supply its own energy through its very own gym-goers, reports CBS station WCBS-TV in New York. “If you’re gonna be here and gonna be working out, why not turn it into energy? It makes total sense,” says Allison Stockel, a Ridgefield patron. How it works is a “power pod” attaches to the wheel of a regular spin bike, turning it into an electrical generator. As riders pedal, power is produced and fed into an “inverter,” where it’s sent to the gym’s electrical grid, keeping lights on and fans running. “Anything that can give back to the club, save energy and pay for itself over time is gonna be great,” says Jim Johnston, the club’s owner. Johnston thinks the new system will really appeal to eco-conscious exercisers. A single workout produces enough power to light four fluorescent bulbs for an hour. Over the course of a year, spin classes will produce enough juice to light 72 homes for a month. “Everyone’s become more personally competitive, trying to see how much wattage they can create,” says Cathy Wien, who instructs the spin class. The setup is the first of its kind in Connecticut, but it turns out all over the world, all kinds of people are coming up with all kinds of ways to capture “people power.”

In London, a nightclub generates electricity with power cells in the dance floor. And some cities are looking at technology in sidewalks to capture energy from pedestrians. Meanwhile, the people behind the pedal power at Ridgefield are looking at other ways to generate energy while people exercise. Those other ways include adapting the technology so it works on treadmills and elliptical gliders, not just spin bikes.

Scottish & Southern Energy has transferred extra staff into its debt collection operation to cope with rising numbers of cash-strapped customers struggling to pay bills. The owner of Scottish Hydro Electric saw profits more than halve over the first half of its financial year to £302.6m on an adjusted basis after a sudden spike in gas prices last year was only passed on to customers from August although it maintains it anticipates a small increase in full-year profits. SSE hiked average gas bills by 29.2% and electricity costs by 19.2% in the summer.

Chief executive Ian Marchant told The Herald yesterday that he expected to cut bills some time early next year but is “unlikely” to return them to pre-August levels and said the company had already seen signs that some customers are struggling. “We have seen more interest in fixed-price tariffs than in the past from people wanting certainty. We have seen more inward requests for energy efficiency advice and work than we have ever done. “On bad debts we looked at the issue earlier this year and as the house market declined some of our staff that were deployed on dealing with house moves were redeployed into debt collection and so by the time of the price increase we were ahead of where we were the year before in debt collection.” SSE, which also owns Scotia Gas Networks, Southern Electric in England and Welsh SWALEC, reported a fall in bills that were more than six months overdue from £78.5m a year ago to £73.4m but warned of “significant debt management issues” in future. Marchant said: “We have seen a growth in people ignoring red reminders and going to warrant stage. “We are predicting we will see larger write-offs. But we do not think it will get out of hand, If we can reduce prices in the earlier part of next year, when we discuss how you can pay a bill we can spread some of it into the lower price period before. We can spread it over 18 months or two years.” Scottish Hydro Electric provided less power to customers over the six months to September 30 than the year before as the north of Scotland saw drier weather than normal, which cut levels in its reservoirs to just a third of their maximum.

But the company saw a net gain of 450,00 electricity and gas customers over the six months, many in central Scotland. Marchant said: “We are growing in both electricity and gas throughout the UK. We have had a particular focus on the central belt in the last 18 months and we have seen big proportional growth as we raised the profile of the Scottish Hydro Electric brand.” The company, which has net debt of almost £4.7bn has refinanced £500m of the £1.3bn it borrowed from banks including Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland to buy Irish renewable energy company Airtricity earlier this year. The banks have agreed to extend by a year to June 2010 another £500m of the facility. Marchant said he is “reason- ably confident” the company can refinance the remainder. He indicated that the company would look at further acquisitions as “financially-led investors” exit projects. But he said he would consider options including issuing shares to finance future deals. “Bank financing for long-term business is effectively dead for a generation.”

The company reiterated its prediction of a modest rise on last year’s underlying full-year profits of £1.23bn and increased its interim dividend from 18.1p to 19.8p. It said the full-year dividend is likely to increase from 60.5p last year to at least 66p. Its shares rose 55p, or 4.7%, to 1199p.

When Gordon Brown made his announcement of a new £910million package to help homeowners tackle fuel bills and insulate their homes, I yelled at the television, “I’d like to see what you could do with ours!”  Our five-bed detached Edwardian villa has been labelled “hard-to-treat” by an insulation adviser from our local council. This is not what we need to hear as the gas meter in the cellar whizzes round ever faster. The house is built of brick and is half-rendered. It has big windows, rooms in the apex of the roof, and a loft access so tiny that my three-year-old daughter Lizzie couldn’t squeeze through it. In other words, it is an insulation nightmare. The major problem, however, is the lack of cavity in our walls (it seems properties built before 1920 are less likely to have cavity walls). This means that we can’t have conventional cavity wall insulation - which typically costs just £250 subsidised with a government, local council or energy company grant, according to the Energy Saving Trust.

The Prime Minister’s measures, unveiled in September, include the offer of a half-price insulation grant for all households in Britain. You can see the logic. Energy bills are rising more than twice as fast in Britain as they are in the rest of Europe, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Gas and electricity prices went up by 29.7 per cent in the past year against the European average of 14 per cent. Price cuts are forecast in the new year, but most people will still want to protect themselves against any future rises.

Consumer Focus, a new consumer-campaigning organisation, estimates that the average annual household fuel (gas and electricity) bill is £1,308. That’s the average. Our family pays £73 a month for gas and £89 for electricity, on a dual-fuel deal with British Gas by direct debit - £1,944 a year.

So something has to be done. Our options for the external walls, says Matt Colmer, of the Energy Saving Trust, are insulating cladding (attaching a cladding material with insulating properties, such as mineral fibre) or re-rendering with an insulating render, and, internally, reboarding the rooms with insulating plasterboard or covering them with a thermal lining.

Our house is already rendered from the first floor, and has external period features such as plaster mouldings. So Colmer recommends extending the render so that the whole house is rendered, rather than cladding, as this would be more in keeping with the existing style and would not obliterate the period features.

Our road runs the gamut of architectural styles from stone-fronted Victorian semis to fully rendered 1930s bungalows. Covering a house with render where all the properties are pristine brick or stucco wouldn’t go down too well with the neighbours. And as the house is not listed, and we don’t live in a conservation area, a full render would not need planning consent.

Installing an external render insulation system costs from about £6,000 (or £3,000 with a grant), says Ian White, of the specialist insulation company E.J.Horrocks (0151-443 6800, www.ejhorrocks.com). This includes budgeting at £75 per sq m for the render, £600-£800 to remove and rehang items such as plasterwork, drainpipes and lights, and the cost of scaffolding, which is about £10 per sq m. For specialist rendering and cladding companies, see the National Insulation Association website, www.nationalinsulationassociation.org.uk.

Internally, Colmer says it is not necessary to have insulating plasterboard on every wall, usually only those with an external side. “Plasterboard is a couple of inches thick, so it can have an effect on the proportions of a small room,” he says. Installing insulating internal plasterboard costs from £42 per sqm (or £21 with a grant) by a specialist company. For the three internal/external walls in our 6.2m by 3.8m sitting room, the largest room in the house, this would be £900 (about £450 with a grant, plus redecorating). But we have 11 rooms and a hallway and landings, so the cost and upheaval would be considerable.

There is also a DIY option, which is cheaper but does not offer such a high degree of insulation. A flexible thermal lining such as Sempatap Thermal, made by Mould Growth Consultants, 020-8337 0731, www.mgcltd.co.uk , is like heavy wallpaper. It is 1cm thick, is applied directly to walls, and can be painted, papered or tiled over. It costs about £17.50 per sq m - our sitting room would cost £375 (about £187 with a grant, plus redecorating) - and is particularly suitable for houses with period features as it can be applied around them.

And the loft? “When there is limited access, the solution is to spray in insulation with a machine,” says Colmer. At about £500 (£250 with a grant) this is comparable in price to standard loft insulation, and widely available.

So what would the full works cost us, after all grants have been included, using the cheapest option in each case? At least £5,000, including exterior rending, Sempatap insulation in every room, and sprayed loft insulation. So it’s either biting the bullet or spending the winter in Florida.

Scottish & Southern Energy yesterday maintained that its controversial acquisition of Airtricity had been vindicated after revealing it made a £100 million profit on the sale of half of an uncompleted wind farm it owned for less than eight months. The Perth-based utility faced downgrades from analysts and credit rating agencies after announcing it was paying £1.1 billion for the Irish wind farm developer in January. But chief executive Ian Marchant told The Scotsman yesterday that the profit from the sale would vindicate SSE’s move for Airtricity.  Marchant said: “We said to the market at the time, ‘you will in hindsight judge this as a good deal’, and events since have vindicated us.” SSE announced last week that it had sold a 50 per cent stake in the Thames Estuary Greater Gabbard wind farm to German utility RWE, for £308m. When it announced the sale to RWE last week the company was unable to give details ahead of its half-year results, but yesterday revealed that its profit on the sale of the stake was about £100m.SSE acquired 50 per cent of Greater Gabbard when it bought Airtricity. It paid £40m to acquire the rest of the project from US engineering company Fluor in April, but, excluding working capital, said it had sold that stake for £140m to RWE. Marchant added: “To buy something in April and sell it for £140m in November is good business.”

SSE, which this week became Scotland’s largest company by market capitalisation after overtaking RBS, revealed its pre-tax profits in the six months to 30 September had fallen 55 per cent to £302.6m, on turnover of £9.2 billion. Marchant blamed the fall in profits on higher wholesale energy prices, but said the performance in the second half was expected to be much stronger, with full-year profits expected to exceed the £1.08bn reported for the year to 31 March. The news sent SSE shares up 55p, or 4.8 per cent, to 1,199p, valuing the firm at £10.5bn, compared with RBS’s £9.3bn market cap. Despite maintaining that the company was in a strong financial position, Marchant admitted that it had never been so difficult to raise debt, after struggling to sell £500m in bonds to investors. Finance director Gregor Alexander spent most of last week calling potential investors to plug SSE’s strength. Marchant said the bond issue was ultimately oversubscribed, but warned other companies may not be as fortunate. “I think if it’s this hard for a company as strong as SSE to raise debt, then for some good-quality companies it’s going to be almost impossible.”

SCOTTISH & Southern Energy continues to attract new gas and electricity customers with chief executive Ian Marchant harbouring ambitions to be the UK’s largest utility. SSE said yesterday that it had almost nine million gas and electricity customers, a net gain of 450,000 accounts since the start of April. SSE has consistently been the fastest-growing UK utility retailer, with customer numbers roughly doubling since the start of 2002.

Last year SSE overtook EOn, the UK business of the German power giant, when its account numbers exceeded 8.2 million, making its Britain’s second largest utility retailer by customers.

Market leader Centrica, which owns British Gas, is streets ahead, with more than 15 million customers, but Marchant believes SSE could take the top spot.

“I would love to (pass Centrica] but it will take a while, it won’t happen next year … I would love to do it before I retire,” the 47-year-old said yesterday.