Energy prices, what's your plan?

From October 1st gas and electricity will be roughly quadruple the conventional rate, which is going to be a fair old expense for most people and utterly unaffordable for others.

I'm starting to plan for this but I can't much reduce my electricity consumption, just gas by heating the house less. Previously I'd have the house at 17.5° C which did always feel colder than I'd like, but an acceptable compromise on cost. I'll be trialling this at perhaps 16° C at first? I expect I'll also be turning down the radiators in the hallway etc.

I also have a log burner which I'd normally only light on Christmas day, but I've bought in a load of logs for that which will probably let me have a nice warm living room on the weekends. I'd rather not be chucking out a load of smoke but the finances have me acquiescing.

It feels like people haven't quite realised how bad this is going to be?

Here are the price cap rates for 1st October to 31st March:

Gas: 14.76p per kWh (Standing charge: 28.49p per day)
Electricity: 51.89p per kWh (Standing charge: 46.36p per day)

 

We stocked up on fire bricks for the fire some time ago to avoid the inevitable inflation price hike as energy bills soar.

We'll be using that a lot more. Lucky to have it really.

TBH we'll probably slip back into kiwi living mode. There we'd wake up in 12 degrees and spend all day with both the heat pump on and the fire constantly going just to try and hit 18 degrees.

It shouldn't be as bad as that in this house, it may be 100+ years old but it's still better insulated.

The loft will only get heated from any gaming done in a hoody and dressing gown. The small dehumidifier will be on though as I don't want any damp.

My beard will grow.

They will have to do something though, they should be doing something now (the Tories were voted to govern, we're not a Presidential system).

You can't have pensioners spending about half their pension on energy.

If they don't, I worry about riots (seen them before) and people dying.

 

I have a lock until Nov 24 so not too worried personally about cost but have been looking at my own reliance and supply back up solutions with 18Kwh home battery and larger solar array for the summer as I do worry about interruptions in service.

Once installed I will be able to take advantage of smart tariffs for running off a cheaper rate in winter and generate most of my own power in summer.

This is with whole home change to individual heat pumps throughout the key rooms ( for cooling and heating ) meaning I can have AC during these warmish times powered off of solar and no gas in winter.

Already done much of the reduction to low power stuff years ago, the stuff i have left needs the power it needs.

 

Tap into next door’s leccy supply. Wife’s eldest son was an engineer with Western Power Distribution, he will know how to do it safely…


On a more sensible note, already got more efficient appliances in recent years and led lights throughout. Kitchen has a 5’ tube light, switching to led cut power from 72W to just 29W and it’s brighter. Turned heating down 2C, make sure things get turned-off and no leaving theTV on whilst not paying attention to it. Using the iPads more and the PCs less and, when gaming, use v-sync so the gpu uses less power only pushing out upto 60fps, etc…

 

I feel like people won't realise until the bills start arriving, then they'll just go into debt with their supplier and slowly pay it off for the rest of their lives

The problem is that this isn't like food prices going up, people will likely not notice until the bills start arriving and by then they'll have just run up debt with their supplier. If this was something people were having to shell out money in advance for it would be having a lot more impact.

Making some good moves but the gas will be the real killer. Going by how much gas we used last winter our monthly energy bill will be £750 a month, which is insane.

Edited to fix my sums!

 

I have the same question @The_Crapman why is it costing more to get the stuff to the house? Why on earth are standing charges shooting up?

Beyond the companies raking in obscene profits the government have clawed in plenty from inflation and fuel duty.

Time for them to take the hit. Freeze the cap and inflation drops. Two birds.

That's short term. Then reassess the whole bloody thing, and water while you're at it. Even a good whack of Tory voters want energy nationalised.

We essentially have nationalised energy anyway but for firms and shareholders - few competitors, taxpayers pay for failed ones and instead of taxpayers benefitting dividends are paid out.

 

FTFY!

 

The standing charge is up to cover the companies that failed as they couldn't make a profit due to the price cap.

 

Sat here in France I'm feeling incredibly lucky with the 4% price cap for domestic fuel and the fact we run a wood gasification boiler for our heating and domestic hot water with the wood sourced from our own land. Even our diesel / petrol is subsidised at 15 cents per litre reduction increasing to a 30 cent per litre reduction on the 1st September.

I know my mother, brother and my friends in the UK are all planning on reducing their consumption but frankly I can't see much the average person can do without massively affecting their quality of life.​

 

Its costing more because of supply and demand, you may or may not have heard, but there's this thing going on with Russia and some countries have no other route to gas, hence paying more on the open energy market to secure their needs.

Nationalising something isn't necessarily the right option particularly if you go the half hearted route, Kwarteng etc. appear to only be looking at the middle men, which is a bit like taking the 5p fuel duty off fuel, ultimately fruitless, you need to go bigger and do what France did, it'd need a couple of hundred billion though but would surely be more useful to more people than the billions wasted on HS2 and other useless public transport initiatives and green levys or failed NHS computer systems etc.

Certainly a better route than handouts though.

 

It’s the oil and gas producers who are raking in the most and, OPEC likes it that way so won’t increase production and thus reduce prices, to any meaningful extent.

We need a bigger and backdated, windfall tax and Labour’s policy of freezing the price cap at the pre October level. I also think there needs to be more regulation of the international gas and oil markets. The increase in gas price is surely disproportionate to the supply situation. It’s their panic panic mentality that has pushed gas prices to such a ridiculous high.

The only ways I see things getting better, are either Putin being stopped, whether deposed, dying, or assassinated, whichever, or Truss bottling out and calling a General Election.

EDIT: Russia is an OPEC member, so will be applying pressure to other members, to make things worse for The West.

 

Freeze. Can't afford to do anything else.

 

Quite.

That wasn't my question. That affects the price of the commodity. Why is the standing charge, the cost of supplying it along the same infrastructure to your house, increasing?

Edit:

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This is the biggest problem. There is a 3-4x increase over last winter. The price cap before March 2022 was 4p/kWh for gas, from October for upcoming winter is going to be 15p/kWh. How is this rate of increase even remotely acceptable?


On a personal note, I'm pretty comfortable for electricity. I've fixed electricity at 7.5p 4hr off peak and 35p other times until summer next year. I expect off-peak price to be no more than 20p when I renew my fix. There will always be off-peak for people who can take advantage of this.
I've also recently expressed interest for a Vehicle-2-Home trial. For £1600 I can basically convert my Nissan Leaf to a 18kWh battery to time-shift all my home electricity to either off-peak price or free solar.

Gas I'm on price cap, so have to suck it up and pay the increased costs. Luckily I've got over £500 "stored" as credit in my account so hopefully won't see a huge increase to direct debit.
Once I get some sort of home battery, probably going to look at heat pumps before next winter. Shell boss said this crazy price is likely going to last a few years. Gas is the biggest problem.

 

Ah ha. Eyes not working today.

Paying for failed companies, I mean it does make you wonder why privatisation is better for consumers than nationalisation.

France nationalise EDF. EDF have won the contract for the new nuclear power station.

We seem to privatise everything and either shareholders or other nations taxpayers reap the benefits be it energy, water, trains....

 

They failed for the same reason many others will over the next year, no one could see this coming, as a business they were running on slim margins buying limited capacity to keep competitive and offer good prices to attract custom through cheap tariffs, it was able to do this because it was private and in competition, and many benefited from these alternative suppliers for quite some years.

Once it becomes nationalized, it will likely waste billions, still cost more than it should and you'll all be moaning it's not good enough, like the NHS.