Leccy prices.

Is that the ofgem energy price cap, which then gets further reduced to the govt energy price guarantee?

As I understand it

Currently the price per kWh for domestic customers is around 35p and the Government are paying approx 17p so the current price is 52p

From January domestic customers will still be paying approx 35p but the Government will also be paying an extra to cover the 20% price rise.

In April it appears that the Government will reduce the amount they will support rise prices, including reducing the support for the rises in January.

Commercial users don't necessarily get the same support as domestic customers.

If on a fixed price contract the rate per kWh may be higher (before the Government payment is taken into account).

Dunno. Just what I am supposd to pay

I have offpeak heating, and I'm with EDF. They emailed yesterday to say my offpeak rate would go down to 12.26p per unit from 1st Jan. I'm currently paying 15.58p.

My "day rate" is on a 2 year fixed price of 12.32p which expires in March next year. I am not looking forward to finding out what happens then!

There was an obvious cost for entering into a proxy war with Russia.

If our leaders had made different decisions beforehand, perhaps we could more easily afford these costs, but we didn't and that was known before all this blew up.

It was a bit like a government failing to invest in an army and then deciding they will start a war.

Today we see more stupidity, the UK, Italy and Japan are going to invest in an expensive new fighter jet. The Ukraine war should have taught us that cheap drones and guided missiles are the future of war, not vanity projects like this.

It looks if you took your 2 year contract out at the sweet spot in energy tariffs. Before the company I was with went under my fixed price contract was around 15p/kWh and I took that out at about the same time as you - but that changed when I was moved to another supplier.

Probably in March it will go to around 35p and in April up by another

The Russian war will push prices high, OPEC want to keep prices high by reducing output, a deep recession will kill demand and push prices lower, summer starts kicking in after April lowering demand and possibly prices. The government are likely to stop supporting prices as much as they will be doing January to March.

While there is much truth in this maybe we shouldn't forget that if the Russians were better trained and they had better technical equipment then cheap drones wouldn't be so effective. Looking at some of the Ukrainian precision artillery shooting I wonder if some of it isn't laser targeted by drones. The lesson from this conflict may be that the jamming of drone flight/control/communication will make the kind of drone warfare that we are currently seeing non-viable in the next conflict.

At the moment the quango is setting the price cap, but then the gov is setting a lower maximimim and funding the difference (out of borrowing).

Drones can be autonomous, return to base, like a plane. It is hard to imagine sure fire solutions to stop drones that would not also work against planes.

I really don't think supporting human pilots is sensible, I'm also not clear what advantage huge expensive and yet vulnerable fighter jets offer. I would be interested to hear a rationale.

At least with the Aircraft carriers, there was some idea that they might be useful as a base for operations against third world opponents, police type actions.

That's just a smokescreen. The truth is, if we'd kept the coalmines open and carried on burning coal in the power stations none of this would have happened. The environmentalists are wholly to blame and they should all be dealt with in a way that I can't describe here, but it involves rope and turbine blades. Bill

There exist GPS guided shells that can correct their flight path a little bit and end up bang on target

Given a drone image and a map its not hard to figure and code in the exact lat/long and probably automatically set the gun up for correct azimuth and elevation.

Then the shell only needs to correct for windage and minor range variations

This also means that worn barrels are less of an issue.

There is a slightly faster response than can be achieved remotely. Current thinking is the aircraft itself is a drone command point. But yes, manned aircraft are perhaps not so useful and will go the way of the battleship.

Woodchipper. Feet first. Jim

Thatcher closed the coal mines, and pivoted to gas. The current problem is due to overreliance on gas. Admittedly, not a concern in Thatcher's time, but no one addressed this problem as our North Sea gas ran out.

I can see anti-Nuclear are to blame, but not the anti CO2 brigade.

Old Labour closed even more mines and New Labours Ed Miliband

New Labour also destroyed our own nuclear power building capability and allowed the existing nukes to be bought by the State-owned French EDF. Then they failed to commission replacement nuclear PS's in the noughties, when they should have done do, mainly because they had their own internal warfare with the anti-nuclear faction of the Labour party.

Over a decade of cheap Russian gas had made it possible for some people here to crow about how much they have saved by switching suppliers many times.

The anti co2 brigade have resulted in policies where any investment for future North Sea (and the UK surrounding seas) gas/oil exploration was discouraged. Why invest in finding and extracting gas when all our needs are to be met by wind turbines and solar and you are demonised for suggesting otherwise. The greening of political policies has resulted in a great deal of common sense being lost in the wind!

And you paying much more for your energy over the past decade has made zero difference to the current situation.

The only reason I paid more over the last 15 years is because all the green taxes are loaded onto electricity bills which went up across the board by 50% over last decade. During the same period (before 2021) gas prices were flat thanks to cheap imports and ZERO green taxes. Many of the cheapskate minnow companies failed because Ofgem shut them down because they were failing to pass on the green taxes which they had taken from customers.

The problem is that the same corporate interests made both of the above the 'green agenda' Along with anti-fracking.