Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, small energy firms, among those struggling to stay afloat, as world gas prices spiral.

Can they blame the market, though? Shouldn't they have saved for a rainy day?

It's rained several times through the past two years with the pandemic, with individual

black swan events. And, you know, we've boughted the salon well when it's rained. You know,

we've put our brolleys up and we've stayed dry. What we've had here, it's not a rainy day. It's a

tsunami. Yes, the cost of higher gas is affecting food prices, fertilizer, even abattoirs.

But is it all, in in fact Russia's fault?

Well, this crisis doesn't need to really exist in the first place. It could be over really

quickly, but it would take Russia to act. Pipeline politics. That's Business Daily from the BBC.

Peter McGur sounds like an exasperated man.

I'm disappointed, disappointed, and the business secretary has not reached out.

We've been in crisis as an energy sector with the prices rising, you know,

if not for weeks, for months in that sense, and nothing has been done.

And only when there was going to be no fit on the table have they thought,

oh, hold on a sec,

we should maybe step in and do something.

Peter runs a firm called Green Energy.

It's a UK gas and electricity company supplying about a quarter of a million British households.

It's one of dozens of energy firms now looking at potential collapse, with a global gas price spiraling, but with its income from

customers fixed by tariffs and government price caps.

We still have cash in the bank, but unfortunately we know that we will hit an iceberg, you know,

in the coming months. And I believe that most small suppliers or medium-city supplies

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