Scottish Power becomes the 4th Energy Company to announce Price rises

[series530]

Don't just consider those that you can 'Switch to now" - in that case, they almost always miss Cheapest Electricity Suppliers - Electricity Providers UK | iSupplyEnergy which doesn't pay any commissions to comparison sites and so often isn't listed. We'cve been monitoring their 12months fixed prices and for use they have been consistently the lowest for over 12 month now.

Good point - and easily missed. I've book marked them for later. Thanks

 

[Darkwood]

power producers don't buy at wholesale prices, they have a whole different category of pricing - see below from DUKES (Dukes 1_7.xls). The final figure is for 2012, so ok it's not bang up to date, but AFAIK this is the actual figure for the actual price paid in that year for the gas burnt whether supplied from a long term or short term contract..

What focusing on the base price alone of gas misses though is the proportion of electricity generated from each fuel. Last year the price rise in gas was offset to a large extent by switching a big proportion of generation from gas to coal.

This year this will inevitably reverse due to the closure of 3 x coal fired power stations in April, plus the impact of Osbournes carbon tax on coal prices in particular, so we're now feeling the 50% price increase in wholesale gas this winter that was effectively buffered by the switch from gas to coal last winter.

So it does annoy me when people almost excuse the lack of any proper detailed analysis of the situation by the press or politicians by saying that the figures don't exist - pretty much all the data you could possible want is published annually in DUKES at least to get a reasonable overall picture of the situation, though it doesn't break it down for each individual company. The problem is lack of any journalists or politicians prepared to actually do some basic research for themselves beyond reading a press release / summaries of the documents involved

Im not quoting press/tabloid releases im quoting independent released investigations into the big 6 companies and at present we have a massive conflict of interest of energy companies in charge of both generation and sale of our energy, this leads to a designer smokescreen when trying to establish what was payed for when and how much... as i said before it is of no advantage knowing the price of oil gas or coal etc on any specific date if the energy companies do not have to reveal when how much and at what cost they bought it... transparency is key here and until they are forced to disclose this info we have to belief all the crap they feed us... why are energy bosses getting 36% pay-rises hitting pay zones of 2.5million when their customers can't afford to even use the energy... yes they say they froze staff pay in line with the rest of the uk but strange how each year bonuses have shot up to somewhat bridge the gap.


Watch debate (on now) - hard questioning from the energy and climate commitee - with all the big energy companies and the hard questions they are having to answer TBH their responses are not good they are really struggling to justify things... its even made worse when a small supplier has openly revealed I.E. been transparent and said the wholesale price of energy has stayed roughly the same for a number of yrs... now you should have seen the big suppliers faces to that statement... i can see change coming hard and fast its all pointing to collusion between the big firms although this can be hard to prove. So answer me this how can a small Energy supplier reveal their costs giving full transparency and make what the big 6 suppliers are saying look like a lot of hot air.

 

[Gavin A]

The wholesale price has been below the break even price for gas generation from a lot of the gas operators for much of the time - it's been depressed by the availability of dirt cheap coal from the USA, along with many of the coal plant operators deciding to use up as much of their remaining operating hours as possible prior to the carbon tax introduction.

3 GW of this cheap coal generation that was running fult tilt last winter has been closed down this year, with higher costs gas generation needing to take its place.

Therefore either the wholesale prices will need to rise significantly this winter, or the gas operators won't supply the extra generation capacity needed and the lights will go off.

Yes the energy companies ended up banking big profits on last years rises because the wholesale prices didn't go up in line with the gas price rises as they'd expected it to, but this winter it pretty much has to as the coal generation capacity has been reduced by over 10%, and what coal generation there is will be around 10% more expensive due to the imposition of the carbon tax.

I'm in no way excusing the energy companies profiteering, just pointing out that there actually are genuine underlying reasons why wholesale prices really do have to rise this year even if they didn't particularly last year.