Utility Point--energy suppliers selected for me by look After My Bills , has gone bust. I'm £200 overpaid on my a/c. The thing is--this whole nonsense of choosing energy suppliers is just daft. They dont supply diddly squat. Bring back the shilling in the meter.
They are perfectly happy to do that but they will charge you through the nose for your prepayment meter, they are huge burden on those who are already fuel impoverished and who get penalised into having to pay more in real cash for simply not being very credit worthy. EON keep trying to reduce my payments which I thought was odd because that means that in winter my payments will be much higher, I thought the whole point was to average your costs over the whole year but they are keen to reduce the direct debit when you are in credit.
I totally agree by the way, the energy supply market is bullcrap it never brought cheaper anything to the UK, what it did was encourage the construction of huge amounts of gas fired power plants and led to Europe being at the mercy of gas suppliers like the Russians.
they are huge burden on those who are already fuel impoverished and who get penalised into having to pay more in real cash for simply not being very credit worthy. in a previous life i was an energy advisor. Which meant i surveyed peoples loft for insulation, sorted the paperwork for a goverment grant for the work, and gave advice on energy saving--so prepayment meters were very much part of my job. I also had one myself !
We live in a rented house with prepayment meter. Tried to get it changed to normal credit meter but Scottish Power were unable after 1.5 years to install a normal meter. They blamed covid every time. Got a bit annoyed at this so moved to Bulb prepayment with the intention of eventually getting a proper meter. Hells bells, Bulb said I can have a conventional meter for £120 or a smart meter for free. Then it turns out because our house has storage heaters and an immersion heater, I couldn't have a smart meter, but Bulb are working on a new meter to sort this problem. No ETA of course. So, we're stuck on prepayment meter. More trips to the garage with the little red key every week. On the bright side, the 2 years we were with ScotPower, we got refunded £1200 when we closed the account. Which proves beyond doubt prepayment meters are a massive rip off and should be looked into. Why should energy suppliers hold onto thousands of pounds?
Back then..keymeter customers didnt realise that when they run out and borrow credit..they got charged £1 each time when they loaded up again. But i learned it was a waste of words trying to educate pork.
In a previous life I worked for the South of Scotland Electricity Board pre its privatisation as Scottish Power, the promise was that privatisation would create an energy market that would bring down prices for the masses through competition. Of course some people made money from buying shares in the privatised parts, but they could not privatise the Nuclear component which was a huge part of the SSEB so the taxpayer got landed with that part and where are we now, loads of power companies trying to sell you the same electricity on the same grid at different prices none of which ever got any cheaper than it was back before 1991 and Scottish Power are now owned by the Spanish. The SSEB was a great organisation with a workforce that took a lot of pride in the service they provided.
There’s plenty of gas in the ground just down the road from me. Trouble is, it makes the local population twitchy when they frack.
Have you been told which supplier you will be automatically switched to? I switched to EON this year from British Gas the fixed rate deal has 5 more months to run, I thought I would run a quick comparison tonight and every result came back with a negative saving, these are suppliers described as 'good' but apparently even Bulb Energy who I nearly went with earlier in the year are in trouble and need funding. By the time I need to get a new deal I expect my costs will go up nearly 30% god knows how most people are going to cope in the coming year.
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Yeah..LAMB are dealing with it all..EDF will take over. After watching on tv about it..looks like lots more will take the easy way out. 30 % increase..i wish.
Just had email from EDF telling me i am a new customer..and not to cancel my direct debit. Err--too late mate--that was the 1st thing i did. They will be getting my overpayment of £200 from the previous supplier (?? of what ?? ). When thats used up they can ask me to start again.
They reckon a lot of energy suppliers will be going bust. Time to bring on Cuadrilla. Often we talk about oil, oil prices and petrol etc but hydrocarbon gas is sourced in exactly the same way with essentially the same costs for exploration etc etc. Just now the world isn’t using quite so much oil but it sure is short of gas, well in Europe anyway. I mentioned hydraulic fracturing the other day but Ijust wonder how long it’s going to be before the nations says sod it, frack away, we need cheap supplies of gas to fuel our boilers etc. It may be only just around the corner. Watch this space. We aren’t ready to go green yet and gas supplies are still needed.
ahh--no--youre wrong, because the gumment wants us to be all electric in a few years. dunno where they expect it to come from...I know though--there are little sockets on the walls in my house. Plug in--switch on and we are good to go.
In a few years . But what about in the meantime when gas prices go through the roof. Oh. They already are. In the short term , however long the short term is, we as a nation still need to heat our homes. We may well end up with a choice in the interim, expensive Russian gas or cheap local gas. No prizes for guessing which Joe Public will pick and in making their choice they won’t give a flying fig about the environment except those sitting on top of a natural gas field. When the blackouts hit, what is Joe Public going to choose? This isn’t about the M25, it isn’t about fracking, it isn’t about Russian gas, it isn’t about the oil price or the gas price, it isn’t about the environment etc etc . It’s about the whole ruddy lot tied in together.
The problem Malcolm is that most of the UK's electricity supply is generated by gas turbine generators, that's what they spent the last 35 years replacing the coal stations with, they did that because gas was cheap not because they cared much about climate or anything else, it was cheap to buy so they could make a big profit selling the electricity generated from it in the electricity market. While there is an issue with people who want gas heating and cooking it's gas generation of electricity that is the bigger problem I think.
The Dangerous Rally inGas Prices… https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Dangerous-Rally-In-Natural-Gas-Prices.html Also, how reliant would we like to be on Russian Gas? Would we prefer to import Putins gas or develop our own onshore fields? The choice is ours to make.
I think Drax might still be burning coal, not sure how many other coal plants are still operating pretty sure all the Scottish ones are gone now and I think all the coal is imported now or from open cast UK mines.
