There was a vast, astonishing and utterly unforgiveable hole at the heart of the BBC Panorama TV show on Monday, which claimed to be investigating what has caused energy bills in the UK to soar in recent years: the rising wholesale cost of gas and electricity.

The wholesale cost makes up 56% of home energy bills, says the regulator Ofgem, by far the biggest single factor. And it's not as though it's hard to find out more. The very first words in Ofgem's most recent and very widely covered report are:



Wholesale energy costs have continued to rise, particularly for gas, where for example the price of this winter's gas is around 40% higher than last winter's. This increase has been driven by global rises in oil and gas prices. This has contributed significantly to recent increases in customers' bills.

Instead Tom Heap, an experienced and respected reporter, put offshore wind at the centre of the prime time show. This form of renewable energy is relatively expensive and a fearsome array of talking heads lined up to out-do one another in superlatives: "eye-wateringly expensive" was the winner, in my view.

So how much are customers paying for this supposed lunacy? The answer, nowhere to be found in the whole 30-minute programme is about £20 a year - for all renewables subsidies. Include all government levies - mainly for schemes increasing energy efficiency and alleviating fuel poverty - and the cost rises to £80 a year. The increase in the average gas bill alone since last year due to wholesale price rises, using the Ofgem numbers above, was about £170.

Chris Huhne, energy and climate secretary, tried valiantly to explain how the coalition government's policies would keep bills lower, compared to doing nothing. But he was hopelessly outgunned by gas-fanatic Dieter Helm, free-marketeer Simon Less and more.

For the sake of brevity, I'll summarise the programme's other main failings, before ending on the one good thing.

• Banging on about renewables, new nuclear and the cost of grid upgrades is fine if you are debating the future of energy bills. But, compared to wholesale price rises, these have almost nothing to do with the rises already seen. And all but ignoring energy efficiency measures - no mention at all of the Green deal - was just risible.

• Why energy bills are rising cannot be understood without realising how the last 20 years of ultra-liberalised energy markets in the UK led to woeful underinvestment in new plants. We are paying the price for that now.

• Global warming is the reason we must cut carbon emissions. Unless I missed it, neither 'global warming' or 'climate change' were mentioned once.

• A total absence of green NGO voices was shocking. My Guardian colleague George Monbiot did appear, to make his eloquent argument for new nuclear power. But no major environment group agrees with him. These groups think hard and deep on the energy issue and should have had their say.

• When considering predictions of 2020 energy prices, the programme said the government was on its own in saying costs were likely to be similar to now. As evidence of this, it cited higher estimates from Citigroup, which was fair enough, and the insane Uswitch estimate, which was not fair. Furthermore, the independent Committee on Climate Change, whose job it is to set out the most secure, least cost path to a low carbon future, agrees with the government's approach.

So what was the good bit? The statement, clearly made by a number of the contributors, that energy prices are going up whatever mix of technology is deployed, and that unless politicians set out the case for their actions in an honest and open way, public anger is likely to foil the urgent need to give the UK an energy system for the 21st century.