European Commission To Close

The European Commission has threatened to take action to free up the European wholesale markets for gas and electricity, because it had found a serious problems, BBC World News reported.

The Commission said it saw the lack of competition and blamed this mainly on the dominance of supplies by a few national gas and electricity companies.

Its investigation started this summer after UK energy companies complained they were being forced to buy wholesale gas at excessively high prices.

As a result households in the UK have seen their gas prices rise by about 40% in the same period.

And with gas used to produce about 40% of the UK's electricity output there has been a big knock-on effect on electricity users as well.

UK energy suppliers have blamed this situation on the fact that they have been importing increasing quantities of gas from the continent.

This has been partly because of ever increasing demand from UK users and partly because of declining output from the UK's own North Sea gas fields.