DavecUK If over half of our gas comes from the North Sea why can’t the government control prices better. I have said it before, why has all our services been allowed to be privatised. France have controlled their electricity price’s because the government own EDF.
We should use the coal fired generating stations and address the climate situation later, for what little difference we make anyway.
Energy Prices
The thing is what can we do, as a young family, bar using gas/electric how do I stop the cost.
The standing charge is over £200 a yr.
Everything is led, just junk
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The problem is in a time of crisis, people in charge and energy companies are still talking about net zero???
Well, someone must have seen this forum, as the gov’ announced that everyone will get £400 total off of their fuel bills, £66 off in Oct/Nov and £67 off Dec-March 2023.
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Cuprajake I think the danger of this it mixes a few facts with speculation presented as a truism.
- Are there a small group trying to profit from the many…..Yes but this extends down the heirachy of life. I’m sure we can all think of someone who’s only interest is to profit from others.
- . Are narratives created by the self interested/invested….yes, I just watched one and will see many more.
- Is there some joined up conspiracy, the “great reset” as I have heard it referred to…….No, there isn’t.
There are small groups of people with power throughout the world, counties and groups within countries. A lot of those people are not very bright, but are very self interested. So much so, as a group of e.g. a government and senior civil servants, they are all too busy looking after number 1 (essentially corrupted), to create a unified plan, as described in the video.
When this happens you get chaos….which is what we have now. Plus the evidence that some not very bright people in positions of power have not planned anything for 40+ years.
Take one thing she said, water rationing as a plan…not true. Private companies got in the water business and building reservoirs is very expensive, so they didn’t for over 32 years so far. No one made them build them, the reason why, donations and lobbying.
DavecUK So possibly a cack handed way of trying to avoid blackouts!
Partly, at least, but you’ll never see that admitted, as it amounts to “wealthy first, to hell with everybody else”.
According to some reports (assuming they’re right) we came VERY close to blackouts in that really hot spell a week or so back, never mind winter. I guess one difference is that fans, and especiaaly air-con, require electriciy while most heating uses gas.
I think the risk of a really unpleasant winter is unfortunately high, and while the better off can mitigate it to some degree, it’s very possibly not going to be fun for everyone else, even without considering the size of power bills.
Barbeques aren’t a bad idea but I’m seriously thinking about a different approach, given the rumoured size of winter power/gas bills. It’s helpful having a brother with a largish house in Florida. Tickets and subsistence costs can’t be that expensive. Can they? ;) :D
Following on from my Florida comment in the last post, a friend of mine, some 20 years ago, used to rent a decent apartment in Spain for several months in winter. He reckoned that, off-season and outside of tourist and city-centre locations, it was cheaper to fly out, rent out there and eat locally, than pay rent in the UK, even in south Wales, which isn’t exactly London pricing. And he did that on an income consisting solely of benefits.
CoffeePhilE According to some reports (assuming they’re right) we came VERY close to blackouts in that really hot spell a week or so back, never mind winter. I guess one difference is that fans, and especiaaly air-con, require electriciy while most heating uses gas.
The logic is inescapable and it will be worse on still, overcast winters days. So one wonders why the UKs headlong virtue signalling rush to net zero when it will make absolutely no difference to climate change. Why are we building lots of windmills and solar (often funded by the fossil fuel industry). Perhaps because it guarantees the use of fossil fuels?
Why are we fed the rubbish of grid scale storage by scientists (funded by god knows who), when the worlds largest battery will run our national grid for about 4 minutes at 3 am????
The most confusing to me as someone still keen on science….why are we not building more nuclear and less Windmills/Solar? When there is a glut of wind/solar power…those Nuclear reactors are not turned down, nuclear doesn’t work that way….the Xenon burn off problem. Those reactors keep running at the same power level around 90 to 100%, all the steam that’s generated, simply bypasses the turbines. This allows people to ooh and ahh that all our electricity needs were met by wind power. The reality is actually we have 6.5GW of power being generated by Nuclear, when you read 100% of our power came from renewables….what that really means is we have about 3,000 more wind turbines than we actually need….because those reactors cannot be “turned off, or even turned down efficiently”
Buried in page 28 are some salient facts about Iodine 235 decay into Xenon….especially the bit that effectively states as a reactors fuel gets burned up, it’s capability to burn up Xenon reduces and then significantly affects manoeuvrability.
What is left unsaid, is that reactors then have to be refuelled more often. This means less fuel burnup, much less efficiency and more downtime. The other thing that is unsaid is just how much more expensive it is to build and operate a reactor with 50% manoeuvrability (when just refuelled or new, it decreases as fuel is used up).
When these theoretical. new reactors are built in abundance, then we will only have 1500 more windmills than we need and reactors that cost 2x as much to operate.
I had a great deal of interest in Nuclear power over the last 40 years…..in fact one of my university papers was based on safety aspects of low dosage radiation for people working in the industry.
Elcarajillo It’s been a long time since I have read the regs book.
Del_UK It already is but I do not have that copy, I doubt it has changed much !!!
I was brought up on the 14th edition and worked my way through up to the 17th but did not delve much into the 18th. Done the testing and inspecting. I used to enjoy the regs but the old memory is not what it used to be.
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I think the regs can become so complicated that inexperienced sparkies can misinterpret them and cost their customers money. The unscrupulous can also misuse them, especially around diversity calculations…. induction cooker fitting jobs anyone….
Meldrew I can sympathise with the memory bit
Not sure if this has been talked about, but I was chatting to someone I know who owns 8 petrol stations, and simply because of two factors, a) they work on a GP% and b) there is no longer any competition, he is making an absolute fortune.
With there only being a small handful of gas and electric suppliers, what incentive, or stick is there to force them to lower prices. This is then added to the government collecting taxes based on % so simply the higher the price to consumers the more goes in to the coffers