It’s make or break time for energy suppliers

The big six is a price rigging cartel,always has been and always will be.One of them could halve their prices and take over all supplies,but it will never happen because it is a closed shop.

Scrap standing charges altogether.
If I owned a Energy Company I would have only ONE SIMPLE TARRIFF for ELEC/GAS for everyone.
OAP’s during the Winter period no matter how long the cold spell – FREE.
How many of the big six would follow suit ?
Especially if I took away, a lot of customers, from them. Only then would they bring there prices down and offer similar schemes.
That’s COMPETITION not ONE puts up the prices and the others follow suit.
NO CUSTOMERS NO BUSINESS
They make MORE money from distribution, than from the customer. They don’t tell you that.
Are well I can but DREAM.
RE-NATIONALISE

Politically, the proposed decision by Ofgem, supported by the CMA and the OFT, to refer the “supply and acquisition of energy in Great Britain” to the CMA is a ‘big deal’. It is intended to shoot the fox that the Labour leader set running with his commitment at his party’s conference last September, if elected, to impose a price freeze. It was not before tme for Labour to begin thinking about repairing the damage it had done over 13 years.

Gordon Brown’s windfall tax set in train a decade of asset sweating and flipping, equity extraction, high leverage, financial engineering, tax avoidance and the hollowing out of balance sheets that actually kept final electricity and gas prices low in real terms. The excessive national subsidisation of intermittent renewables that accompanied the onset of the Great Recession, combined with the shale gas boom in the US releasing supplies, and lowering the price, of internationally traded coal, with a large share of oil-indexed external gas supplies, and with the phase-out of Germany’s nuclear fleet, all hammered the balance sheets, share prices and market cap of the major European energy companies.

The reality is that final energy prices in Britain have only begun to catch up with excessively high prices in much of the rest of the EU as the big energy companies seek to repair their balance sheets. Four of the UK’s Big 6 are subsidiaries of four of the EU’s Big 7 and are doing their best to help their parents at the expense of consumers in Britain. SSE and Centrica are going along happily for the ride.

This proposed UK inquiry will achieve little, though a comprehensive inquiry by DG COMP might achieve something of substance. The solutions lie in a reduction in the excessive subidisation of intermittent renewables, the acceleration of approvals of US LNG export projects, the repair of the EU ETS, the development of a competitive EU market in gas transmission pipeline capacity, complete ownership separation of the currently vertically integrated wholesale and retail businesses, the re-establishment of currently captured energy regulators to ensure they strike a balance between the interests of investors and those of final consumers, the roll-out of smart meters to all final consumers, limited government guarantees during the construction and early operations phases of energy infrastructure projects and the restriction of subsequent ownership to genuine long-term, ‘rate’ investors.

The proposed inquiry is incapable not only of addressing the real underlying detriments, but of identifying and enforcing these remedies.