Electric and Gas Cost

ThatFragranceGuy said:
www.thetimes.co.uk

Energy bill rebates to help against rising costs

Boris Johnson is poised to announce billions of pounds in state-backed loans to reduce the impact of soaring energy prices on household bills.The prime minister
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk
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“The firms will recoup the money from consumers in subsequent years to pay back the loans as energy prices fall.”

This is just a short term stop gap to help the energy companies then?
 
Loans required because of a systematic failure of the Tories to plan and manage the Country's energy strategy over the last decade.
12 years of a nothing poiicy and now we are reaping the consequences.
While the O&G majors have been milking the system, paying themselves obscene slaries and spunking profits to their shareholders we run out of gas with negligible investement to replace our own natural resources.

Shame about Octopus though.
 
How about we start exploring for O&G again, like our good friends In Norway? There are ways to make it more kind to environment. Investment in Gas storage also.
 
Markviduka said:
How about we start exploring for O&G again, like our good friends In Norway? There are ways to make it more kind to environment. Investment in Gas storage also.
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Absolutely not. Not even worth considering. Try and ue more of something we know for a fact is destroying the world we live in? No thank you
 
None of these suggestions are particularly useful. By the time anything is implemented and usable the wholesale price will probably have dropped to normal levels and we'll carry on as we are. Also, I've not read through all of this thread so not sure if someone has already mentioned it but we already produce plenty of gas in this country but we export it all because *we* don't produce it, private companies do. Nuclear, wind, hydro, fracking or whatever is meaningless if it is a private company that is producing the energy because we are then still at the whims of the wholesale market but with a huge up front infrastructure cost which might be better spent just subsidising bills.

I've just run the numbers on my energy bills, my fix is due to end this month. Currently costing me £155 per month ( £60 of that is charging my EV). Price cap going to have me at £291 (£112 for the EV). That makes it about the same cost to charge my EV as a 60mpg petrol car would be at £1.45 per litre.

One thing I'm not sure on, does the price cap only affect the unit cost or does it affect the standing charge as well? I'm using the below figures:

The rates under the price cap also vary by region, but on average, they are currently set at:
  • 4p per kilowatt hour (p/kWh) for gas
  • 21p/kWh for electricity
  • A standing charge of 26p per day for gas
  • A standing charge of 25p per day for electricity
 
Nano said:
None of these suggestions are particularly useful. By the time anything is implemented and usable the wholesale price will probably have dropped to normal levels and we'll carry on as we are. Also, I've not read through all of this thread so not sure if someone has already mentioned it but we already produce plenty of gas in this country but we export it all because *we* don't produce it, private companies do. Nuclear, wind, hydro, fracking or whatever is meaningless if it is a private company that is producing the energy because we are then still at the whims of the wholesale market but with a huge up front infrastructure cost which might be better spent just subsidising bills.

I've just run the numbers on my energy bills, my fix is due to end this month. Currently costing me £155 per month ( £60 of that is charging my EV). Price cap going to have me at £291 (£112 for the EV). That makes it about the same cost to charge my EV as a 60mpg petrol car would be at £1.45 per litre.

One thing I'm not sure on, does the price cap only affect the unit cost or does it affect the standing charge as well? I'm using the below figures:

The rates under the price cap also vary by region, but on average, they are currently set at:
  • 4p per kilowatt hour (p/kWh) for gas
  • 21p/kWh for electricity
  • A standing charge of 26p per day for gas
  • A standing charge of 25p per day for electricity
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Wholeheartedly agree that we need to find additional sources for clean energy, However we are a long, long way off heating our homes with anything other than Gas.
 
SmallTown said:
Absolutely not. Not even worth considering. Try and ue more of something we know for a fact is destroying the world we live in? No thank you
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So we will carry on paying higher prices, the infrastructure and other means of heating isn't there yet. Gas will be our main source of heating in our homes for the next 10/15 + years without a shadow of doubt.
 
Markviduka said:
So we will carry on paying higher prices, the infrastructure and other means of heating isn't there yet. Gas will be our main source of heating in our homes for the next 10/15 + years without a shadow of doubt.
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That's no excuse to destroy the planet. If anything we should do that opposite. Do as much as possible to stop our reliance on the things whose price fluctuations are causing the price rises.

It seems crazy to me for someone to say we should use more gas, as a solution to high gas prices.

Short termisim at best.
 
SmallTown said:
That's no excuse to destroy the planet. If anything we should do that opposite. Do as much as possible to stop our reliance on the things whose price fluctuations are causing the price rises.

It seems crazy to me for someone to say we should use more gas, as a solution to high gas prices.

Short termisim at best.
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If price is high because supply is low then it makes sense to increase supply. It all depends whether we can increase supply enough to cover our own requirements or not so we aren't reliant on wholesale markets though. I have no idea if that is even possible so I won't comment.

Fact is that the majority of buildings in our country are heated by gas. It will be quite a long time, and money, until that isn't the case. Until we're not reliant on gas the solution is probably to do both. Generate as much electricity as we can without using gas and allow the gas to be used domestically instead. We use way more gas heating homes than we do producing electricity. That number isn't going to drop quickly so even if we switched to 0% used for electricity generation it still wouldn't be cheap to heat our homes.
 
They are separate from the government. They are there to make sure companies aren't ripping customers off and passing on rising costs via higher prices isn't ripping us off.

The government could help by offering households or the companies a subsidy but OFGEM couldn't enforce anything like that. Freezing the price cap would probably just put the rest of the companies out of business. Interesting concept because the government would probably have to step in and save the companies or nationalise them. A nationalised company would be able to keep prices low if the government guaranteed to cover losses.

More likely taxpayers will cover the losses and the private companies will rake in huge profits once wholesale prices drop and prices stay high.
 
Nano said:
They are separate from the government. They are there to make sure companies aren't ripping customers off and passing on rising costs via higher prices isn't ripping us off.

The government could help by offering households or the companies a subsidy but OFGEM couldn't enforce anything like that. Freezing the price cap would probably just put the rest of the companies out of business. Interesting concept because the government would probably have to step in and save the companies or nationalise them. A nationalised company would be able to keep prices low if the government guaranteed to cover losses.

More likely taxpayers will cover the losses and the private companies will rake in huge profits once wholesale prices drop and prices stay high.
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That was kind of where I was coming from, the price cap stops in place and if the energy suppliers won't hang around taking a hit till the wholesale prices drop (during the lowest energy consumption time of the year) then the state takes over.

It seems to me the likes of EDF, BG etc have had years of using our energy consumption as a licence to print money, they should be made to use the funds they have from these years to subsidise the next 12 months or till the wholesale price drops back to a normalised figure.
 
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