Electricity prices - Standing Charge, Standard Energy and Offpeak Energy

All down to hiding taxes in fuel bills.

The standing charge covers the green levies, and also paying for all the electricity companies which have gone bust and importing their customers. I suspect this latter part has increased significantly just recently.

So it's effectively a tax rise to cover the suppliers who offered deals too good to be true and went bust. Perhaps this should have been levied only on the former customers of those companies?

Andrew

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, at 10:13:16 on Sat, 12 Mar 2022, Andy Burns snipped-for-privacy@andyburns.uk remarked:

The suppliers might have hoped that to be the case, but the one year fixed deal I was offered and declined starting on 1st Jan (when my previous fixed deal expired), was noticeably cheaper than what I'll be paying when the new cap kicks in.

Thanks a lot, Martin Lewis.

the customer should have lost their money when the parasite companies went bust.....

My standing charge for the past 99 days was 36.3% of my total gas+elec bill

If usage remained constant for the 99 days starting in April, standing charges would go down to 33.8% of my total

so even though the pence per day figure has gone up, and disproportionately so for electricity, they actually aren't gouging on standing charges ...

I think £86/household (or was it £68 ?) of the typical rise on the price cap was attributed to the SoLR charges; plus how much it's costing to sustain Bulb in administration (wasn't that £1k/customer for 3 months? and no end in sight)

Why should the 15 million who never switched get £85 added to their bills to bail out the failures ?.

Probably not that uncommon. We have gone from fixed price tariffs (with two different companies that failed) to "protected" tariffs that were higher with a single company and, as that protection has ended, we had a choice of their (now rising) variable tariffs or new fixed ones. In either case it meant around a 100% increase from our previous fixed tariffs.

The fixed deals that we managed to get in February, mean that we are paying (a little) below what the variable rate tariffs will be from April and a lot below what they are likely to be from October. Unfortunately they will end in February again.

Yes, and he was recommanding a "MY BP" caard as way of saving mone. Suely by not buying at BP you can save more (unless you don't actually pay)

Dave

It's basically a Conservative con-trick. Going back to Thatcher, they encouraged competition for perhaps valid, but certainly ideological reasons. They *pretend* to have strong regulation, to protect the consumer. Arguably they encouraged competition in the retail market a bit too much. Ultimately, a price cap just is not consistent with a free market, hence the failures.

While a more left wing government would pass losses on to the taxpayer, the Low Tax party has to do something else, and they chose to force them on to the electricity user. Actually of course because practically everyone pays tax and buys electricity, it doesn't make all that much difference.

Why should there be a price cap to protect people who have difficulty in paying for the energy they use? Why should we be paying for the stealth tax called warm house discount?

I got my outstanding credit back from a failed supplier. With the current "levy" on standing charges I'll be paying it back within a couple of years!

If it hadn't been for that guarantee I probably wouldn't have let the amount of credit build up so much however if the company was still in business it would have fallen to almost zero this time of year as most of my gas usage is for central heating. I'm in the position where I can easily afford to pay for lower bills in Summer and much higher bills in Winter whereas it seems that a lot of people cannot manage this type of financial control and want a constant monthly payment - hence a build up of credit.

I suggest at the first sign of people losing any built up credit with a failed energy company the big remaining suppliers would have been inundated with claims for repayment of billions of built up credit on their own books. This would probably have resulted in some of the remaining companies going bust.

Just ran a spreadsheet of my monthly consumption of gas and electricity averaged over the last seven years, to compare Octopus' Loyalty 10-month fixed offer with April's price-cap rise, over the period of April to March 2023.

The fly in the ointment is the coming rise in October, so I ran the spreadsheet for the twelve months April to March for variable percentage increases of the April rates to apply from October, and compared the two offers.

The April cap prices win out (cost less) for October rises in unit prices and standing charges of up to 93 percent over the April cap. I suspect that rises of this magnitude will cause riots in the streets and governments to fall, so I'm not going to take up the 10-month Loyalty fixed offer.

YMMV!

And in similar vein why do all of us have to pay the 'green levy' when we'd rather have a guaranteed energy supply from the traditional generators?

If people want 'green energy'. let them pay the full cost of it, and suffer the irregularity of supply - this winter there were two separate weeks where the laughable renewables were struggling to supply 10 percent of demand. Freezing their balls off for a week at a time might concentrate their minds on how thoughtless the renewables programme is.

Well, they might as well nationalise energy utilities in tthat case. Save all of this nonsense next time markets inevitably rip.

ROFL. If you had worked out what you were really paying (because your DD was deliberately too high) then you weren't saving very much at all.

And you didn't get your credit 'back' from a failed supplier because it had no money, which is why it failed. Just like all those stupid people who fall for banking scams and 'move their money to a safe account' you have been given money by the shareholders of your new supplier.

Some of the cheapskate minnow energy suppliers that failed, did so because they *hadn't* been making their contribution to the various greenwash schemes. They were just another Northern Rock, buying spot and lending long, so doomed to fail at the sniff of trouble.

Yep. I missed out on the few pence that I would have got investing the amount of money I had in credit :)

I didn't get the money back from the shareholders. I got back from the mugs who were already used to over paying for their energy.

Who will deliver a 1945-style landslide victory to Labour at the next next GE. Sellers packs will be back with a vengeance plus massive tax increases on the cheapskates who didn't bother to insulate their sold-walled, suspended-floor 'character' properties because they thought the cheap gas would just keep on flowing.

Idiots, here is is one whining to the DT -

"One reader from Dorset has moved between seven different suppliers since last year after four companies collapsed or he was moved to tariffs that were vastly more expensive than his ­previous deal.

He switched to Symbio, an electricity-only supplier, from Together Energy, in May, paying £184 a month to heat and power his large Victorian house. He said: ?It went bust in September and I was passed to E.On. I did a quick comparison with my exact meter readings over the past year and was quoted £454 per month.?

I hope he has enough income to pay the ~£8K that it will cost to heat that icebox in about a years time.

Gas? What gas?

Our 1930s villa-style house is cavity wall, which has duly had shredded paper sprayed in. Because the outer leaf appears to be made of bricks of depleted uranium, this shredded paper has remained dry. We also has the loft insulated up to 10" and all the windows replaced by upvc dg. All frames are screwed to the brickwork, although how they managed that with the uranium I know not. But they did it; I watched 'em.

Meanwhile - the suspended floors. Are ye suggesting we have 'em up? Yer being extremely witty, if so. Other bright ideas?

Don't believe that.

I've just done some quick calculations (for my usage) and with the Octopus 10 MONTH fixed price deal for electricity the October capped price increase would have to be above 75% for the fixed deal to break even and for gas the October capped price would have to be above 85%.

All referenced to the April capped prices.