Tuesday 16 June 2020

COMING CLEAN ABOUT UK ELECTRICITY PRICES


Here's another abridged extract from John Constable's booklet "brink of Darkness" (GWPF)

Britain’s electricity suppliers are reported to be considering further increases in prices to consumers. Climate policies are largely responsible for such price increases, yet government is more than content to let private energy companies and their shareholders take the blame. 

Intoxicated with subsidies, the electricity sector has hitherto colluded in this obfuscation of causes, but the introduction of the domestic electricity price cap may change this situation, encouraging energy suppliers and indeed all businesses, to name government as the guilty party. History provides very few clear lessons, but the records are tolerably clear that revenue collectors and tax farmers are always and everywhere loathed without reservation. This may be unfair, but it is a fact, a human universal. 

Why then did Britain’s energy supply companies willingly accept the task of raising the necessary subsidies for renewable energy directly from their customers’ bills? This in effect made these private companies covert revenue agents for the state, and so allowed government to hide the costs of energy and climate policies. Anyone familiar with the industry will know there is no doubt that energy and climate policies 
are and have been for some time to blame for rising electricity prices.  

In the absence of policies, electricity prices would have been stable to 2020, rising from about 14p/kWh in 2014 to about 14.1p/kWh. In actual fact, prices stood at 16.4p/kWh in 2014 because of policies, and were expected to rise to about 19.4p/kWh in 2020. We appear to be on track.

 A very large part of the public perception that energy companies are greedy and ruthless results from the industry’s short-sighted decision to allow itself to be used as the cat’s-paw of climate policy. The hazards of this situation must have been obvious to the main board directors concerned, but the temptation to collude was certainly extreme. 

The express-service renewables-target timetable required subsidies so large that the increased turnover and de-risked profit made the danger of bad public relations seem tolerable. The industry may well come to regret this lack of caution. 

A market sector debauched by subsidies, and already held in contempt by the public, will be in a very weak position to resist nationalisation by a radical socialist government. No one will step forward to protect a persecuted tax farmer, and the expropriators could be expropriated without any resistance, with the only public outcry being one of approval.  



1 comment:

  1. 2020 Recorded Weather Dependent Renewables Productivity UK

    Onshore wind 24%
    Offshore Wind 31%
    Solar PV 10%
    Average Renewables 22%
    Conventional Generation 90%

    What do these productivity numbers mean?

    Think about electricity generation as an ordinary business, which provides a product which has to be of consistent high quality and which is vital to all the other businesses of your Nation.
    But more than half of your labour force only turn up on 1 day in 5. And you don’t really know which day that might be.
    But the unions insist that if they do turn up you have to employ them and lay off some of the guys that can work full time.
    And worse than that, almost to half of those guys only turn up 1 day in 10. And those ones usually arrive on days when you are not likely to need them but you still have to pay them in full. Anyway, they always go home before the time of your maximum demand.

    The unions also insist that you pay them about 5 - 15 times as much as your ordinary productive workers.
    These workers get tired quickly and retire a third of the way through a normal working lifetime.
    And when these guys do arrive, they cause difficulties with quality assurance, severe industrial disruption and have the ability to suddenly close down your production altogether.
    This is the scale of business problems faced by Electricity supply managers that the ill-informed decision to opt for collecting dilute and irregularly intermittent energy from the environment and calling it Renewable. And the problems get worse as more Renewables are forced onto the system.


    And all this in the UK is insisted on by law to show your neighbours how virtuous you are at tackling a fabricated non-problem. However, your regulators self-destructive actions can only ever affect perhaps ¼ of a diminishing 1% of the perceived global problem. At the same time your own politicians and regulators seem to want to pay out these sums which in combination with your worker’s unreliability will trash your own economy for the possibility of very marginal effect at the end of the century if at all.
    The competitors in your market don’t think you are either wise or virtuous. They will not be following the “lead” you have established. They are mocking you. They will be delighted to take advantage of the huge commercial disadvantage that you have had imposed on all your country.
    https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/excess-costs-of-uk-weather-dependent-renewable-energy-2019/

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