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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.
ketsbaia-
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.
Scrabble
What is there to elaborate, you suggested:
2.9bn gets you the retailer but no energy, how does that solve the problem of high prices that the 100bn is poorly targeted at.
The TUC proposal was about stopping exposure to retailers going bust not capping energy bills