Energy Suppliers, Suppliers of Energy. Gas / Electric

"Just do this, there's literally no downsides" often works well as the basis for government policy TBF

Proper lols in here

Oh right. I didn't realise Tesco was the only place you can buy an essential service, was the only place producers of that service could sell it to the public and made no profit whatsoever. I see how the analogy works now.

I'm not suggesting the government do this in isolation, obviously, as you could potentially glean from my follow-up posts. I would suggest getting rid of the ludicrous marginal pricing, which would save a fortune, and taking the peaking plants into public ownership too. So little of our electricity is generated by imported gas and yet all of it is affected by that price rise. It's nuts.

Long and short of it is there are cheaper and better ways of tackling the crisis than insisting taxpayers bail out a failed market for the next 20 years. They won't be tried because they'd have to admit it was a failed market.

There would be gaslit uplands...

How are you not grasping that the retailers are not the ones making profits? It is the energy producers - you need to buy them - which I don't think is a thing you can really do. Certainly not quickly - and who knows how many billions it would cost. The retailers that you want to nationalise are on their knees - why do you think so many went bust last year? Some are owned by the big companies making the mega bucks (I got moved to Shell Energy when my supplier went bust) but the 3 billion does not get you Shell - it gets you Shell Energy (retail) - which will be making a loss at the moment.

Sure - decoupling the energy market so that renewables cannot sell their energy at the marginal gas price seems like it makes sense - but that can be done without spaffing 3 billion on loss making admin teams.

What I'm hoping they do is they cap the bills, and decouple the energy market. That way we get the short term reassurance that we're not gonna starve/freeze this winter - while the government get to work on making sure they are not paying more than necessary to cover the bill in the meantime.

Ideally they'd also shut the fuck up about fracking / north sea gas and stick a windfall tax on the fossil fuel producers. Tell them they can apply to have their money back if they use it to finance more renewables. This seems unlikely given Truss's start.

We know they aint gonna stick a windfall tax on it, this situation is another plaster and it gonna be another disaster the tax payer has to pay for while the big companies get even richer.

This is my fear - but we can limit the scale of the tax payer burden by doing some tinkering with how the market works - it's what they are doing in the EU too. If anything though, it limits the profits of the renewables sector, while letting the gas twats continue to rake it in. Seems the wrong way around to me!

gas twats

Love it

question: with the price cap at 2.5k, can I leave my central heating on 24/7 and run a crypto farm, and the most i'll pay is 2.5k?

This doesn't quite feel right...!

Bills aren't capped at £2.5k, the p/kWh is capped and for a typical family home that would be equivalent to a 2.5k annual bill, so you can pay substantially more or less depending on your usage

Slightly worrying it can be interpreted as a hard cap, as a colleague made a comment yesterday that they could have the heating on all the time if the cap gets fixed

thanks for the clarification.

Yeah, saw it as a hard cap which would be crazy.

Typical bill. Those with old drafty energy inefficient homes will pay considerably more. Not seen the unit pricing yet, has anyone?

Green levies suspended as well, a chunk of which pay for insulating homes for the least well off

There is a twitter thread ( https://twitter.com/michaelujacobs/status/1567766156877959168 ) on the german model which sounded (unsurprisingly) way better than this unfunded Truss plan.
Roughly -everyone gets a base level of free gas and electric. It's set at a level where it covers the poorest's needs in pretty much full. Use above that is charged at above the market unit rate so the richer/bigger user you are the more you pay. Big incentive for those users to limit use/insulate/close off the East wing for the winter etc.

Interesting. Much more progressive (and very similar to schemes run in LDCs to support critical infrastructure whilst supporting the population), but imagine it’d be a huge heap of work to actually implement in the short term when something needs to be done now.

Similar (ish) to how Stephen Fitzpatrick (OVO boss) talked about tapered support last week https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62742303

a chunk of which pay for fucking up homes by shitty insulation installation for the least well off

The 'loft spray foam' predators on Facebook will be sad about this

Martin Lewis summary on todays announcement

Finally replaced the last non-energy efficient bulbs left in the flat yesterday.

Had 6 50W halogen spots in the bathroom since the bathroom was redone ~15 years ago, two had already been replaced with 7W LED versions due to failures over the last few years, but I swapped out the remaining 4 halogens for LEDs.

Highest rated bulb in the flat is now 10W.

Last 12 months we were ~4300kWh for the three of us in this flat.

Looking at my smart meter info it looks like it is 6kWh/day when we're not there at all, so that's fridge/freezer and random computing stuff that I have running 24/7, 250W isn't too bad as a base level. Goes as high as 20kWh/day in the winter, although it should be lower this winter as all the bulbs are now energy efficient and I've got rid of some old computing stuff.

Fridge/freezer is 15 years old, surprised it has lasted this long as it came with the flat when we bought it.

Rolling 12 month electricity usage is trending steadily down and is 10% less than 2 years ago.

Can't look at gas (cooking, hot water, heating) usage in the same way as our gas smart meter is too far away from the smart electricity meter (which is the one that sends the data to the supplier) and so I have to submit manual meeting readings if it starts looking too far away from their estimate. I may have provided an inflated meter reading at the start of this energy crisis - ahem.

Long over due they have been has the piss took right out of them as usual.

But also covered free boilers too, the full thing was a fucking farce.

How are you not grasping that the retailers are not the ones making profits?

Yeah, I was operating under the assumption the energy cap rises planned for October/January and April were to facilitate the retailers making a profit and that, by removing the profit motif and running energy retail as a public service (in conjunction with sorting out the marginal pricing), you could negate the need for said rises. If that's too simplistic a view of it, then apologies.

Academic now as we have our proposed solution.

assumption

Lol

My line of business (energy consultancy) - we're currently estimating 35p/kWh elec, 9.7p/kWh gas

Can some explain to me:

Does 'profit' (of the energy retailers) include money earmarked for re-investment?

If so is there, in theory, any way in which the government to intervene to make sure it goes there and not into shareholders' pockets?

I'm sure the govt. can get a cut of their negative profit, yeah

If they were Tesco, they'd be buying tins of soup for £5 then selling them on for £1.

It's the oil / gas producers making the big bucks (or, the producers of the aforementioned £5 tins of soup), as the price for their product has gone up due to demand caused by lack of supply, but the costs for producing it have stayed mostly static.