Will the energy regulator’s plan make a difference?

Thats a good comment John they can levy what they like including zero standing charges(but hit you elsewhere ) and your right, light user are hit the most due to OFGEN fiddling with the rules that helps big businesses .Of course maintenance comes into it but from what I could get , many of those companies HIDE the standing charges, they have doubled from previous years and can be 40p +/day. Other utilities are upfront in what you pay in rental like the telephone companies , you might not like it but at least you know what it is up front and you are paying for any repairs to the service and/or maintenance due to storms / vandals/ “official vandals ” local council digger digging up cables etc .

I can see your point, John, and it is valid in most cases I expect. But there are some electricity consumers for whom a daily standing charge and a relatively low unit price is a better deal. I think people should have the choice, and, as I said in a previous comment, there should be much more openness about the unit prices and standing charges available from different companies for a pre-payment tariff. I doubt if standing charges are ever a good idea on a gas supply account because of the long period each year when very little gas is consumed.

Just change to Utilita – they don’ t have standing charges on their prepayment tariff.

They DO have TWO tariff rates, so the cost per unit decreases after a certain threshold, but that’s still a lot nice than having a standing charge.

What is LNG?

Liquefied Natural Gas Ian -logistics- sea to Poland – Gazprom ? a few miles to Poland via a pipeline. Poland,s latest statement -quote-we want to be the European hub for US LNG —(please sir ? -pretty please “Your Highness ” grovel-grovel )

Most of the shareholders of the big energy companies are pension funds, life assurance companies, and investment funds. If you have an occupational or private pension you will be hoping for the best yields.

You’re right about the poor subsidising the well-off (see below). But nationalisation as the solution? Implausible.

Rant alert! (I hope a respectful rant is not contrary to ‘Which’ policy).

The problem is ‘renewable’ energy. It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that we must change over to renewable energy, See for example Stephen Hawking’s outburst recently on the BBC , that we are (or may be?) reaching a tipping point which would result in the Earth becoming as hot as Venus (hundreds of degrees C.) Incredible (to some) is that the BBC should broadcast such tosh. Suppose (bear with me a moment!) he’d said the opposite – that he didn’t regard the current rate of warming as particularly dangerous. Immediately critics would have said – what do you know about it, you’re not a ‘climate scientist’ so you’re not qualified to judge! A few other scientists – certainly not as distinguished as Hawking, but not so far off – Nobel prize winners – some more qualified as ‘climate scientists’ than Hawking – have criticised the disaster scenario, and been told pretty well exactly this.

I do not challenge the agreed science (though I reserve the right to point out what it is – the consensus is less extensive than you may assume). Challenging any claim about the ‘agreed science’ just gets me called a denier (poor me!). I do however say that even if you accept that the science (as I do) , and believe (as I don’t) that it shows that we are in real danger, and must do something (or as an absolute minimum be in a position to claim that we are doing something that might possibly stop catastrophe), it is still possible to question the policy we adopt in response. It should also be possible to query the economic analysis – a consensus (if there is one) among economists is hardly as impressive as one among physical scientists.

So, what about the policy? Take UK policy as an example. This is based on two propositions, which are not clearly compatible. First, that ‘renewable energy’ has become, is becoming or already has become cheaper than that from fossil fuels. Secondly, that in spite of this, we must continue to subsidise it (indefinitely?). This is done – in the UK – by loading this ‘essential’ subsidy onto the cost of electricity. The result (you might suppose) would be to discourage industry from investing in UK, so sending jobs to less scrupulous locations abroad, perhaps increasing emissions rather than reducing them. Whether that is true or not (it is claimed there is little or no evidence to support this plausible idea) it is certainly true that loading this subsidy onto domestic electricity prices is a regressive tax on the poorest. Every winter more of the poorest turn off their heating because they can’t afford it. And in consequence more die.

So, suppose that you are right in thinking that we must continue to subsidise renewable energy (although it is cheaper than fossil fuel) – shouldn’t this be done out of general taxation, rather than a regressive tax that hits the poorest hardest? State the alternative preferred, with reasons for your choice! (Rant ends).

It is easily forgotten that the privatisation of the UK utilities etc was hugely popular at the time and it precipitated the demutualisation of building societies and other mutual organisations. We rue the day now and it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

Energy costs actually fell in real terms following privatisation. It is anybody’s guess where they would have been now if they had remained under state control.

And before British Telecom was privatised you had to beg for a landline, have the socket in the hallway, and couldn’t buy your own telephone instrument.

Nationalisation wasn’t all good.

If I’m not mistaken, phone sockets arrived before privatisation.

Your right on two counts Wavechange -#1- PST sockets were installed before outright separation of the GPO from BT –1981 ( dont mean the separating of the company as not part of the government/GPO ) which I found out to my cost as the police started hitting me with parking tickets which,after an argument, BT paid for. I have all my original instruction manuals from the government training school . #2- yes Wavechange I installed plug-in phones to public homes they were called the PLAN 4 system and as they required multicore wiring for bell+return ( in series ) one machine clip through the cable could mean a complete rerun of the wiring and I installed them in mansions taking days , there was even a current booster in some cases for keeping the bells ringing as you had to have a bell-box in case you unplugged all the phones . Each bell coil was 1000-ohms so you could add that up in series – 4000 ohms was usually the limit ( now its parallel operation ) . I have all the original circuit diagrams going back to the 20,s .For some strange reason BT+ Wiki dont want to talk about plan 4 but I have all the details.

A trip down memory lane. 🙂 You can edit this if the authors have it wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_socket

I wonder if those of us who supported privatisation would have done so if we had realised that part of it would fall in to the hands of other countries so quickly. It’s not a bad idea for countries to try to be self-sufficient in food and energy production. An advantage of coming out of Europe should be the opportunity to recover control of our energy industry but I don’t have any great confidence that this will happen.

I know that plug-in phone sockets replaced hard-wired junction boxes for new installations before the privatisation of British Telecom but my point was that the public corporation would only put them in the hallway. At least it soon became possible to buy doublers and extension sets so you could have your phone wherever you wanted it. I went mad and had three phones in a one-bedroom flat! – one blue trim phone, plus green, and cream, standard phones to suit the decor.

I assumed Duncan had written that Wikipedia piece, Wavechange. It has his hallmark on it.

I wish I had John , I would have added some additional technical information but you made me smile John and thanks for that. If you had kept your trimphone it would now be worth more than you paid for it , they were all recalled because they had luminous dials which radiated above safe levels of radiation (long period ) , then re-issued again . The radiated dial ones are valuable (if you can find one ) your green tele 746 is worth more than the cream one . They then came out with phones in football club colours also worth some money , I still have a pushbutton (old type ) trimphone only sold for a couple of years , the original pushbutton telephones had an internal battery that only lasted a year or two.

Of coarse. Wikipedia comes in for a lot of criticism but factual errors but anyone can correct and update articles. I wonder how many users of Which? Convo do this.

There are one or two Wikipedia pages that I keep an eye on and update from time to time. They cover specialist topics closely related to my professional engineering knowledge and interests. It is nice to be able to share that knowledge in a public space.

Because anyone can change anything on a Wikipedia page, it is important to watch out for “opinions” that are presented as “facts”.

Good checks are to see whether or not references have been provided to cite suitable supporting evidence and, if so, whether or not the references are from reputable sources.

I agree, Derek. Specialist subjects are often well covered in Wikipedia because only those who understand the subject are likely to contribute. In biochemistry and microbiology there are many Wikipedia articles that are very good and cite papers and reviews in peer reviewed articles.

Hmmm. I think we are supposed to be discussing energy regulators. As a sat nav says – turn around when possible. 🙂

That is not my experience of pre-privatisation of B.T.

What is your experience R.T.Green ?

Things are different in Scotland Tim where Holyrood directly pays subsidies(taxes ) to the renewable energy industry as well as receiving grants from an EU fund , there again in Scotland they are pro- green energy . half of energy there is green : http://zmescience.com/ecology/renewable-energy-ecology/scotland-renewables-08042016/ and if you dont believe that the BBC backs it up. Meanwhile Germany has just announced 35 % of its energy is renewable. I am also with an eco/green friendly power company. Do you know that Scotland was presented with an award by the EU for the best figures received for green energy in Europe ?

Tim,

Thanks for your long, detailed and well laid out post.

My opinion is that we should not burden energy prices with elements that will act as regressive taxes on the poor.

As regards climate change, I am content that it is happening, but I remain more sceptical as to whether or not human activity is accelerating its rate of change.

Nonetheless, I think it is better to be safe than sorry. So, if a “low carbon economy” may help to limit the extent and rate of climate change, I think we should pursue that.

In the early 1980s, I worked on renewable energy research, under the UK Government programme started in response to the 1976 oil crisis. Global warming was effectively unheard of then, but we were concerned about energy security, environment pollution (“acid rain”) and other shortcomings of using coal, oil and gas for electricity production.

At that time, our nationalised generating company, CEGB, was still building new nuclear power stations and advocated their usage as the lowest cost option for “always on” (baseload) power.

Subject to the provision of appropriate means to deal with such things as striking miners and unreliable/unpredictable foreign suppliers, coal, oil and gas were regarded as appropriate for load following, so renewables were set the tough target of competing with the marginal costs of coal generation.

It never has been, and it probably never will be, possible to balance demand and supply of electricity totally and correctly, so there is always an inbuilt inefficiency. However, it is possible to make intelligent forecasts of requirements and the resources available so it need not be entirely haphazard. Managing the balance is actually helped by the diverse types of generation available. Judgments need to be made about which resources to deploy for optimum economy and reliability of supply. It is inescapable that there has to be sufficient conventional generating capacity to handle 100% demand assuming there is no contribution from renewables, but this is not necessarily a major problem. If generating capacity is idle it is not wearing out so that prolongs its life. Wind turbines can be disengaged if their potential output is not required whereas the sun is either shining or it is not – but even the hours of darkness between dusk and dawn are totally predictable. For my liking, solar power is not efficient or reliable enough in this country to justify the huge investment that has been made in it but the economics have been so badly distorted that it is not surprising. It makes a useful contribution from time to time. The good thing about the wind is that there is usually plenty of it when the heating is on and people are indoors cooking and washing and using equipment. There should be a control mechanism so that air-conditioning plant can only run when the grid is receiving a certain proportion of solar power. Not practical, I know, but possibly worth thinking about. I think harnessing wave power should have taken priority over solar power except for water heating where raising the temperature of the water intake to a heating system even by a few degrees saves a considerable amount of energy, especially where an electric immersion heater is the sole heat source.