rlhttps://stuffunemployedpeoplelike.com/2009/03/09/31-claiming-its-not-cold-enough-to-turn-on-the-heater/rl

So the "Big 6" have effectively held the HM Govt to ransom and got away with it!

Prices will still go up, customers will still get shafted by the energy providers and in addition have to pay more tax to pay for the green levy which was meant to penalise the energy companies for not reducing carbon emissions.

When viewed in conjunction with water bills and the ridiculous cost of public transport (especially rail) people are now realising the folly of Thatcher's privatisation of the essential services.

Yes but don't forget, NPower have promised, the day after their 10.5% price rise, that they will not put up their prices again until 2015, unless prices go up again.

In other news I promise not to eat any more chocolate between now and christmas, unless I eat some more chocolate.

Will that be the prices that they themselves set since, as [iWhich?[/i explains, they effectively sell to themselves?

I hate to point out the blindingly obvious, but energy companies don't use energy - they make it.

The green levy was ALWAYS going to be passed onto customers. The aim isn't to penalise energy companies, but CAUSE price increases to make customers use less. The same is true for carbon trading. If the cost isn't passed onto consumers, they will carry on exactly as before, using just as much energy.

The reality is that most of the so-called carbon reduction benefits in Europe have come from crashing economies combined with subsidies to 'green' fuels. If you want cheap electricity, burn coal (the cheapest of all being brown coal, which is highly carbon-intensive). If you want green electricity, put up a windmill or solar panel - but accept the resulting significant price rise (plus indirect cost of subsidies). You cannot have your cake and eat it.

As for the rest of the thread, for the umpteenth time, most of the increase in wholesale prices is due to the UK's lack of self-sufficiency in fuel (and the increasing production costs of depleting fields) and the consequent requirement to buy gas from Russia etc. Privatisation, bonuses, profits, dividends etc are absolutely nothing to do with the reality of what's driving prices upwards.

Not all of them, and those who do sell to the domestic market are happy to keep separate their generating and retail businesses, to their advantage, so in reality, none of the domestic retailers "make" energy.

So [iWhich?[/i got it wrong, then?

No they don't and if you believe that then you don't understand what energy is.

Gas, coal, oil etc are merely carriers of energy and the energy companies simply facilitate the carriage and sometimes convert, usually at a cost to efficiency



The green levies are not there to punish consumers (as the energy companies would have us think), they are there to pay for energy reduction techniques (better insulation etc), encourage the development of alternative technologies and offer transitional relief to those who are struggling to heat their homes.



How do you work out that brown coal is cheap? Tonne for tonne it may well be but not if calorific values are taken into account. Brown coal has a value of around 6.5 million BTU/tonne, anthracite (what this country was good at producing until the 1980s), has a value of around 25 million BTU/tonne

Wholesale prices for Gas and Electricity are actually lower now then they were in 2008.

There was a big spike then but they fell back and while they have risen again they are still lower than in 2008. Yet for the last three years prices have gone up 10% a year. The green levy and rising wholesale prices are two things definitely not to blame.

There is some detail herehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/household-bills/10043967/How-energy-bills-have-soared.htmlrl

and herehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2478713/Energy-giants-greed-Energy-bills-10-profit-customers-double.htmlrl

Not exactly your left wing papers.

It seems to be when wholesale prices fall we see little of the savings but when they rise by even a small amount we get an increase and then some from whatever level prices were at. There seems to be a constant upward trend in domestic energy bills to a degree not present in wholesale price rises.

Some of the pros & cons of nationalising the big 6. It says Centrica & SSE are worth £30bn, how much are we spending on HS2? www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 81112.html

Some of the pros & cons of nationalising the big 6. It says Centrica & SSE are worth £30bn, how much are we spending on HS2? www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 81112.html

So you link to The Telegraph article, which shows again that the average Net Margin per customer is ~£50 as some kind of evidence that everyone's being ripped off on bills of over £1,000 per year on average? Even if it were wiped out entirely, it wouldn't make much difference to the size of the average bill. This idea that profit is somehow to blame for everything is rubbish.

A far bigger impact would be had by cutting direct and indirect taxes for example. I also have no problem with cutting executive pay enormously to help out.

Meanwhile, wholesale costs are almost as high as they've ever been - and when they were previously close to today's levels, energy companies were losing money. Hence the regulators have had to allow tariffs to rise.

codead - fossil fuels are of course the storage mechanism for energy. Energy companies (I'm including oil, gas and electricity companies) convert this stored energy into either a medium which customers can use themselves (i.e. gas and petrol), or directly into electricity.

Of course converting it uses some of the energy itself, but I suspect most people wouldn't be able to find oil and refine it for themselves, or run a power station, so that conversion is necessary unless you want to go back to the stone age.

In the end its us - individuals and industrial customers - that USE energy. If you want to change that usage by pushing people away from fossil fuels, then you MUST accept that the cost will fall on end-users. That is the WHOLE point of green costs - to make end users change behaviour.

Sadly far too many people live in a make-believe world where green costs can be charged to big bad industry, and somehow not impact the cost of living.

Talk of miniscule profit margins being made from companies who appear to be generating the very fuels that they then sell onto us end users is one thing, but the bit that I struggle to comprehend is how my energy supplier, Co-operative Energy, with its 142,000 customers can compete on price with the likes of EON and NPower, giving gross energy sales of £74.8 million and increasing their total trading profits by 16% last year.

In any other line of business you'd expect the manufacturer to hold the whip hand on pricing, a manufacturer who sells their product on an open trade market and also retails the same product to a huge domestic market should be able to completely control that market and yet they tell us that they make a miniscule profit margin from each of us consumers and sometimes a loss.

Something doesn't quite add up somewhere.

So [iWhich?[/i was wrong, was it?

The problem is no-one can find out how much profit the energy companies are actually making. They have several different companies and it's difficult to find out the true profit, the Commons Select Committee hearing found this problem too and I believe one of the smaller Energy company bosses said was the case

What bit of bills up 10% but Wholesale costs up a mere 1.7% don't you understand?

And thisPrices have been rising at around 9% almost annually for several years, adding £300 to the average bill in this parliament. Over the same time, multibillion-pound profits made by the utility companies have soared by more 70%.[/irl

suggests your original stance that "Privatisation, bonuses, profits, dividends etc are absolutely nothing to do with the reality of what's driving prices upwards."

is totally ridiculous.



It is not a punitive measure at all which is how you make it sound. It's a levy with the aim of reducing energy consumption by providing for improved insulation.