Life – Terror. Ecstasy. Fight. Denial. Flight. Failure. PAIN. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. Hope. Love. Peace – Death.
Every three months The UK’s energy regulator [Ofgem] review and set a level on how much energy suppliers can charge for each unit of energy. From 1 April to 30 June 2024 the price for energy a ‘typical household’ who use electricity and gas and pay by Direct Debit will go down to £1,690 per year. This is £238 per year lower than the price cap set between 1 January to 31 March 2024 (£1,928). All good so far? However, the actual amount you pay will depend on how much energy your household uses, where you live and type of meter you have.
How much ‘we’ pay is also dependent upon ‘a standing charge’. An additional charge added to [most] gas and electricity bills by your supplier as a fixed daily amount that you have to pay, no matter how much energy you use. Your standing charge covers the cost of supplying your property with gas and electricity. From 1st April to 30th July 2024, the average standing charge cap is approximately 60p per day for electricity and 31p per day for gas for those on standard variable tariffs paying by Direct Debit.
What tends to happen is, the price cap (for individual units of energy) drops but in the same breath, the standing charge increases? Most people will pay £300 per year just for the facility of having gas and electricity, even if you don’t use any. This is due to the high energy standing (daily) charges.
The charge can also currently vary from region to region because of the differing costs in supplying energy to a particular area. On average, the standing charge in the ‘North’ of the UK is double that of the ‘South’!
Ofgem’s most recent data shows that customer debt and arrears in energy [energy debt] is now around £2.6 billion. This is double the level at the start of 2020, and as the debt increases, a greater proportion will be unpaid.
Energy Debt?
Commercial energy debt includes gas and electricity arrears and count as priority debts because suppliers have the power to disconnect your supply if you do not pay – and they don’t need to go to court to do this. In order to reduce ‘Energy Debt’ [to suppliers] Ofgem, announced that in order to help offset their higher debt costs suppliers are allowed to add an extra £28 charge to all household bills.
Should those who are not in debt be subsidising those who are, when Massively increased profits could easily wipe out energy debt. 19 Aug 2023 — Eon, Scottish Power, and EDF announce record profits in the first half of 2023 as millions of UK households continue to remain in [heat or eat] fuel poverty. Dividends paid to share holders have never been greater? Yet we are being asked to pay more! An additional, [compulsory], energy debt surcharge presented as a protecting infrastructure and greener energy development when in reality it is nothing more than taxing consumers to subsidise [owners], share holders of ‘wealthy’ energy suppliers.
Ofgem claim, this latest surcharge is designed to ‘avoid a repeat of the market rout in late 2021’ and early 2022 when 30 suppliers collapsed as wholesale energy prices surged and the price cap prevented them from passing on the extra costs to consumers. At the time, Ofgem allowed the remaining suppliers to recoup the cost of bailing out the millions of customers of those failed companies by adding £82 to each household bill.
Are energy companies making huge profits?
So just how much money are energy firms raking in? All the big energy giants have seen profits balloon over the past year. In 2022, Shell raked in £32.2billion – the highest in its 115-year history. Rivals BP made profits of £23billion during the same period, up from about £10.7billion in 2021.16 Feb 2023
What is the profit of British Gas in 2023?
Centrica released figures on Thursday showing that British Gas, which supplies energy to UK households and businesses, showed its profits jumped to £751milion in 2023, up from £72m a year earlier x 10 increase!
How much profit did EON make in 2023?
It raised its 2023 investment target by 0.3 billion euros to 6.1 billion and posted a 27% increase in nine-month core profit to 7.8 billion euros.
What private sector companies are profiting from the energy crisis?
Global Witness assessed the 2022 annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies: Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies. Together, their total profits add up to $195 billion in 2022, nearly 120% more than the previous year, and the highest level in the industry’s history.
Households are facing dire financial straits because of soaring energy bills at the same time as companies that provide the power are making record profits. Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has summed up the anger of many struggling to make sense of the disconnect.
Britain’s energy network operator National Grid has paid out almost £28bn in dividends to shareholders since privatisation, while the pace of investment in the transmission network has stagnated, finds new research from the Common Wealth think tank.
A new analysis, published during the UK’s Labour Party conference, finds that to meet the government’s existing target of reaching a decarbonised power grid by 2030, five times the number of transmission lines need to be built by 2030 than were built over the past 30 years.
Analysing additional data modelled by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (formerly BEIS), Common Wealth finds that total “network costs” (fees paid to transmission and distribution companies via customer bills) required to upgrade the grid in order to achieve net zero are expected to reach between £40bn and £110bn by 2050. Guess who will be paying for that?
Yet in “stark contrast” to the required surge in investment, Common Wealth’s report reveals that investment has in fact stagnated over the past decade – and even decreased since 2017 – despite a “quadrupling in the deployment of new solar and wind“. Common Wealth’s report reveals that over the past decade (ending March 2023), National Grid paid an average of £1.6bn annually to shareholders, totalling almost £28bn in dividends since privatisation by the Conservative Government in 1990.
Can ‘I’ refuse to pay an imposed [not consulted upon] surcharge? Refuse to pay others ‘energy debt’? Legally, I suspect not, I suspect that somewhere, buried within the myriad of T’s & C’s there will be a clause that says I cannot.
If I don’t pay, who should pay?
1. Share Holders who have received phenomenal increased dividends these past 3-4 years. A proportionate, decreased or even a none payment for a year or two? That would pay off the entire ‘energy debt’ in one swoop. 2. The Government, a Conservative Government, fundamentally opposed to ‘taxing’ private companies profits above helping their ‘citizens’ who are living in energy poverty. 3. Me and you, who are [somehow] managing to pay our bills, making daily sacrifices, in order to do so? I am definitely in the 1 and or 2 category not that we have ever been given a choice?
Yet we do very little to influence these actions? Actions that affect us all, have done wo for 3-5 years. If we were French? We would be blocking roads, motorways, airports government infrastructure?
Thanks for Reading
#Peace
#fuckcapitalism
Dying to Live 