Surprise! Bet you weren’t expecting Ofgem’s energy price cap to rise, again! Or perhaps you didn’t take Ed Miliband’s word for it when he said that energy prices would fall by £300 under a Labour government. This week, Ofgem announced a 4% increase in its price cap. Again. It’s okay though, because the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, says that tackling the problem of rising energy prices is her “number one priority”. But what is the reality that the Labour Government and its false promises seem to be completely divorced from?
From October, the cap on a typical dual-fuel bill paid by Direct Debit will rise “from £1,663 to £1,723”, states Ofgem. When Labour won the 2024 General Election, the cap was £1,568. The cap rose in seven out of the nine quarters since then. But even these figures may be misleading.
Ofgem isn’t helping. Not helping us, anyway. It is helping the Government hide its policy failure. Those with sharper memories will recall that the quarterly cap set in July was higher – at £1,862, not £1,663 as is now claimed. The lower figure is the result of fairly typical quango goalpost moving. Ofgem has decided that household energy consumption has fallen, so it has adjusted its estimates of Typical Domestic Consumption Values (TDCVs). The old TDVC assumed that the average home used 2,700 kWh of electricity a year, but now consumes 2,500 kWh. For gas,
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Why are you using a photo of Helen of Troy?
I don’t think Fanny Ciabatta is long for politics.
This just proves the point that you don’t actually have to be very intelligent to be a minister. You just have to follow group think and you’re made for life as you rise up the greasy pole to your ultimate level of incompetence.
Another price cap increase will come in January. Before the Labour shower of shit were elected, the price cap would drop in April and July but now that doesn’t happen.
I wonder what the spin will be when the inevitable power cuts happen? Blame it on those nasty foreigners who should have made up the shortfall, maybe?
I reckon any power cuts will be made selective, cutting off power to British villagers while maintaining supply to Fake Asylum Seekers, especially to their swimming pools:
Migrant crisis: RAF Wethersfield asylum seekers ‘irked by lack of swimming pool’ despite dozens of free perks and shuttle services to nearby towns
“But no matter how much Labour loses control of prices…”
Only one thing controls prices, the market. As Mrs Thatcher said: You can’t buck the markets. There is a direct link between supply, demand, price. Throw a spanner into that natural market mechanism with subsidies, taxation, price control, regulation and the outcome will be bad and certainly not as “planned”.
This demonstrates what economists have been saying going back to the 18th Century, no single person or group can have enough knowledge to be able to plan and control an economy. Net Zero is the economic model used by Socialism and Fascism – the idea that the State can direct all the elements in an economy to serve the political and ideological interests of those running it.
It never had control. Governments don’t control prices, they distort them,
The same goes for markets or any aspect of an economy They distort them.
Control suggests they can take things exactly where they want them to be. That never happens. What they do is they bend things out of shape, almost invariably causing knock on effects that create even more problems.
Exactly!
Price controls never work. Nobody can have enough information to know what the correct free market rate is, which varies anyway.
If price is capped above normal market rate then consumers pay too much. If it is capped below natural market rate then suppliers will stop supplying or go out of business as their costs increase and they stop making a profit and start making a loss. This is why a number of smaller retail electricity suppliers have gone bankrupt.
Clearly the price cap is below free market rate, and so must be periodically increased otherwise suppliers facing increased cost from the wholesale market and the subsidies for Ruinables passed on to them by NESO, as well as the increased tax burden and inflation, would withdraw from the market.
The retail suppliers still in the business must be mitigating their loss from price capping somehow. I expect tax credit for losses, reduction in service to consumers, reduction in payroll expense – fire people, hiring freeze, wage freezes, reduction in investment.
Interesting that the Typical Domestic Consumption Values for electricity has dropped by 7.4% and for gas has dropped by 17.4%. So less energy consumed overall and certainly not shifting from gas to electricity – for example by replacing boilers with heat pumps. Either the government drive to insulate homes or put solar on them is having a massive effect in a very short time or people are putting up with colder homes (possibly due to concerns about the costs). There’s one other alternative: global boiling has reduced people’s need for heating.
David Turver has reported that a large number of the plug in solar panels do not meet the requirements of safety regulations. Especially those sold by Octopus and Amazon. See his Eigenvalues website.
Why is an African in charge of our energy policy?
Well done to you for asking the question most people are too brainwashed to ask!
I wish people would wake up and put things in perspective more often, such as asking:
“Why don’t other countries such as France, Germany, Russia, Israel, China or India have Africans in top posts in their governments?”
She’s Helen of Troy, you ra cist.
Limiting the charge to customers or reducing tax does not reduce its cost. That applies to everything and is observed whenever governments over ride the market price.
It is as true for housing as energy and rent.
Every human activity now has to filtered through the CO2 prism. The public have been coerced into accepting the pretend to save the planet policies that are costing them an arm and a leg. Not because they understand them, but because questioning them becomes unnaceptable. They have been convinced that fear about climate wrapped in virtue is “science” and that all scientists agree. But that “science” that has been hijacked by government in support of public policy is no longer a system of understanding. It has become a tool of enforcement.
The Political Class are reluctant to give up this tool. Uncertainty in the science is ignored. Projections are exaggerated. What once used to be science is now groupthink. All uncertainty has been washed down the eco socialist drain.
So as the so called forecasts fail and models have to be adjusted time and time again to align with the politics, more millions are forced into energy poverty with the highest prices in the world. So then instead of accepting the failed science and projections the politicians double down on it claiming we are not moving fast enough with the very policies that are an economic disaster, and what is… Read more »
Totally agree. They talk about cheap renewables, but that’s always been a lie. Expensive energy is part of the ideology, and the destruction it is bringing is intentional.
All for the greater good.- But of who?
Now that is a good question, and one that I’ve got into arguments over. I think motivation for supporting their agenda is varied. Joe public has been brainwashed, lower management gets bullied, higher management loves a grift. At the top of the pile (Rockefellers, Gates, Sorors etc.) they are enticed by riches and control. They take huge government imposed subsidies, then spend some of that money in directions that will ensure the money continues to flow. They invest in fake “science”, in media, in universities, and in pop-up rent-a-mob NGOs. They bribe leaders of our institutions with promises of better paid jobs working for them, the revolving door. They have every angle of public discourse covered to promote their BS and keep the cycle of sh1t flowing. I’m sure some of them dream of a sort of a Marxist (it’s nearer to Fascism) world without borders where they have even more freedom to do what they like. Some might even privately justify their actions thinking that ending the consumer society and population control might save the planet.
Before you buy plug-in solar, get an electrician to check your RCD fuses. According to advice on BBC Scotland last week. ost British households have older RCD fuses which are likely to close you down if plug in solar tries to feed electricity through your system.
Puts up the cost a bit.
And make sure your neighbour isn’t going to plant a Leylandii and let it grow high enough to completely block the sunlight from reaching your solar panels, as happened to a neighbour round here…
One of the big highlighted problems is that old RCD’s might NOT shut down under certain fault conditions.
So, for £1000 (on a plug-in solar panel), you can save about £110 per year on your electricity bill.
£1000 is the going rate for a rogue electrician to bypass your electric meter. The work is completely illegal and dangerous beyond belief. To be clear, I am in no way advocating that any sane person should be doing this. Any electrician doing work in your property who is unaware that this has been done puts themselves in mortal danger.
However, the savings far outweigh those from plug in solar. As the price of electricity goes up – with a significant factor being poor government energy policy and the obsession with net zero – then more people will be tempted to go the “dodgy” route. They’ll perceive it to be a harmless wheeze to save themselves hundreds / thousands of pounds – akin to using a “dodgy box” for streaming Sky / TNT / Virgin / Netflix etc.
Potentially, it would be yet another unintended consequence of government interfering and incompetence.
That’s a ten year pay-off considering opportunity costs, repayment of the principal and interest on the undoubted credit card loan – then it will be time for new one – if it lasts that long.
Its the Gas lighting that really gets to me, the absolutely Jason Arday level of lies which they really cannot expect us to believe. The contempt is breathtaking.
From now on when any of them comes out with this degree of absolute BS I will refer to it as Arday syndrome
And 50% of the electorate support the Parties who are doing the gaslighting and caused this mess.
‘And it’s important to understand that this is not just an effect on households. It’s also an effect on businesses and industries. With such high energy prices, companies simply cannot compete internationally.’
It gets even worse than this. Very small commercial users – those who might be described as micro-businesses – are disconnecting their mains power. There’s no sense in paying hundreds of pounds a quarter on a commercial mains connection if you only need to run a few lights and workshop tools, and for only a few hours on some days. I know of one case where the standing charge was nearly twenty times the cost of the electricity. Good petrol generators can be bought for well under a thousand pounds.
And if they only use a small amount of gas, mains gas might not be worth it either, compared with using LPG for some cooking kit, thus avoiding the standing charge.
It is the nature of things that you can only have one “No.1 priority”.
I’m shocked I tell you, shocked, Labour lied?!?! Impossible….