The UK would be paying "billions" of pounds less for its energy, if it had stuck with plans to reduce fossil fuel use, an energy boss has said.
Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus energy, told the BBC there should be a concerted push now.
The same "sense of urgency" should be applied to the switch to green energy, as there was for finding a Covid vaccine, he said.
The government said it had delivered a 500% increase in renewables since 2010.
"Without the clean energy we have deployed over the past decade, bills would be even higher today," a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said.
There were already plans to invest further in renewables, BEIS said.
In 2013, the coalition government led by David Cameron made a series of changes, including cutting back support for energy efficiency and later ended subsidies for onshore wind.
"If we hadn't done that, energy bills this year would be billions of pounds lower than they are," Mr Jackson told the Big Green Money Show on BBC Radio 5 Live.
"It's short term behaviour that has left us even more exposed than we need to be."
Octopus Energy generates electricity from renewable sources, including wind and solar and supplies energy to three million UK customers.
A report earlier this year by energy analysis site Carbon Brief said bills in the UK were nearly £2.5bn higher than they would have been if climate policies had not been scrapped over the past decade.
"We now need to get on with it, and going green will not only help prevent the catastrophic climate change we see already changing weather patterns, but will also drive energy costs down," Mr Jackson said.
Mr Jackson said he believed the process of creating new renewables could be speeded up significantly.
This is because it was the planning, consent and connection to the grid that took several years, while the engineering of a new wind turbine could be done in a year.
"In the pandemic we took that normal fifteen year process for producing and licensing a vaccine and we did it in a year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62753949
