• I think my issue is that current wholesale costs are someway below the cap. That's why the Octopus tracker is consistently cheaper at the moment and requires zero EPG support to achieve that.

    I suppose the cap is set over a longer term to reflect hedging by suppliers - but right now energy is cheaper than the fixed tarrifs most people are on. I think.

  • Kind of, if you just look at the cost of energy alone and not the cost of supply. A similar analogy would be that because oil prices have fallen busses should be cheaper to ride, but there’s a lot more than just the cost of diesel that goes into the cost of a bus journey.

    Also the price cap (as it was) was set quarterly as of 2021, and is taken at a point in time looking both backwards at historic prices and forwards based on markets. This is a change to how it was done pre 2021, and yes is there to stabilise the market and prevent large suppliers that are appropriately hedged to recover some of their costs when wholesale prices fall. Otherwise we end up where we were in 2020/2021 with lots of competition, but lots of unstable competition and many smaller firms going bust due to lack of appropriate hedged supply that they are at the mercy of the markets. Whether you agree this is good or bad probably depends if you’re an ardent free market economist or not, but from a consumers point of view having stable suppliers for a key part of their life is probably quite important!

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