It is that time of year again.

elmarko said:
You seem to be missing the point.

A reduction in profit to 2.5% will only take £32.5 off the annual bill (which doesn't even cover a singular price increase).
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You have my view wrong I think, I am not saying that the energy companies are evil and stealing. I am just pointing out that this level of profit per customer is entirely normal for this ssort of product therefore 50 quid a customer isn't some surprisingly paltry amount.

As I said before the energy firms are behaving entirely normally and rationally.
 
OldCoals said:
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Cheers :)
 
RedvGreen said:
More Nuclear plants with further safeguards and security. It is the obvious choice for most countries. We have the advantage of being an island which benefits us through having a country-perimeter coastline ripe for the tidal-generators. That is a sound investment, unless someone knows something about the Oceans boiling off or the Moon disappearing any-time soon?
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From what I've read, a big problem at the moment is that nobody is at all sure that wave/tidal power stations can be made with low enough costs to make them viable. Maintainance costs would be significantly higher due to the constant pounding in salt water and of course it would be worse in the very places that would be best for wave/tidal. There isn't a lot of evidence of the long-term running costs of any of the various wave/tidal power stations that are being proposed and even less evidence of the costs at full scale, so people ae reluctant to pour lots of money into it.

Also, it's not consistent and controllable (although it's signficantly more so than ground-level wind or solar in this country).

It's true that the UK being islands (and especially GB because its shape gives it a huge length of coastline for its size) with large areas of strong tides and waves makes wave and tidal ideal here on paper, but making it practical is a big engineering problem. There's a lot of kinetic energy in moving seas and salt water is quite corrosive.
 
I wouldn't be surprised when they suck most of the money out of the governments pockets. Rightly so too.


Regarding energy, i found that their wasn't really that much difference in monthly costs between energy suppliers..

The biggest saving i could have made was ten quid a month going with one of the smaller energy suppliers but after spending over ten minutes waiting and reading all the bad reviews i just stuck with Scottish power, went with fixed till 2015..

Spending £74 a month on gas/electric isn't too high based on what other people spend I've asked, hopefully i'll bring that down once i get a log burner and combisave valve in here..
 
What are peoples general opinion on solar panels? Seeing as how the cost of them have reduced massively in the past few years, I wonder why they arent installed on every new home built, surely this would be a good investment for the future and help to hit "green" targets? Surely the initial cost can't be that huge for the benefit that free energy brings.
 
Lord-Jaffa said:
What are peoples general opinion on solar panels? Seeing as how the cost of them have reduced massively in the past few years, I wonder why they arent installed on every new home built, surely this would be a good investment for the future and help to hit "green" targets? Surely the initial cost can't be that huge for the benefit that free energy brings.
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It's not free energy and the initial cost is still high (and would be much higher if demand was much higher), but that's only part of the problem.

There aren't any efficient ways of storing electricity on a large scale, neither a large amount in one place nor a very large number of places with smaller amounts. The former is impossible and the latter would require a completely ludicrous number of batteries, at huge expense and some risk even if that many batteries could be made. Every house would need a fair few KWh of batteries for that idea to be at all practical.

So you're left with the system we have at the moment - supply on demand. That works well, but only if there's control over the supply so that it can be constantly varied to meet demand. With dozens of power stations, that control exists. With millions of privately owned power stations, that control does not exist. There would be wild swings from over-generation to under-generation all the time, which would collapse the national grid at best and be downright dangerous at worst. If there's GW of excess electricity being fed into the system at any time, where's it going to go?

Large scale local electricity generation isn't even close to possible, let alone cheaper and better than the current system, unless large scale local electricity storage is also possible. It isn't. Not yet and probably not any time soon.
 
I'm just wondering when was the last time OfGem was doing customer anything positive...? They didn't do anything about the complex tariff till the government stepped in and now they found no evidence, whilst I personally feel sting after sting of rises since moving out of my parents in 2008. It's crazy!

Every year, around aboutt his time, they all increase together. If we do it in the food industry, it's call Cartel!

Perhaps there's an unwritten consent among them that whoever does the first price increase, the rest will follow suit but never out match each other beyond x%?
 
EDF's price rise of 3.9% is approximately half of what the other companies' price rises. Looks like it's going to be increasingly difficult to justify the higher price rises. Mind you, I'm not exactly convinced of the justification for EDF's price rise when wholesale costs haven't risen.
 
The problem with EDF's price rise is, they're doing it in anticipation that the Gov will drop the Green Levies. They've threatened another rise if that doesn't happen. Just a marketing ploy to turn all the heat that's on Energy Companies on to the Gov.

Let's see how this pans out.
 
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