Electricity ...

Holy crap. Mines half that, in € not £.
You were saying?

Well that’s EDF for you (aka SWEB).

My electricity (Economy 7) is 54p/unit day time plus 59p per day standing charge.

Yikes! I’d heard that there’s an energy crisis in Europe but yeesh. For comparison, mine’s 13.9p per unit and 31.5p per day (and that’s expensive; it was 15.8p/day until a few months ago). Was it ever* that low in the UK or has it historically been comparatively expensive?

*As in, in the past few years.

Yikes! I’d heard that there’s an manufactured energy crisis in Europe

Fixed that for you.

You can’t have a legitimate crisis because of “the war in Ukraine” whilst at the same time declaring record profits.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uk-gas-electricity-industry-may-make-170-bln-pounds-excess-profits-bbg-2022-08-30/

See also Shell’s recent declaration.

Is it any wonder everybody is going out on strike?

I should add, my electricity is priced at €0,1374 per unit (and it recently went up from €0,11ish).
However, there is tax, and standing charge, and even tax on the tax. 🤬

So the price I quote (~€0,28/unit) is derived by taking my bill and dividing it by the number of kWh used, to give me the actual price per unit that I pay ¹. More on that here: https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20230126

¹ Or didn’t. Because my wage is crap, the government sent me €100, and because I’m used to it being cold in winter (duh!), that paid the bill with some rolled over for next time. https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20230122 (3/4 down the page)

It certainly feels like the energy crisis has been manufactured, esp. in light of the events going back as far as the covid lockdowns. Our standing charge has almost doubled, so no surprise that the energy company profits have shot up.

Was it ever* that low in the UK

The graph here says it all. When the price cap was first implemented, the first thing SWEB (EDF) did was to hike the off peak unit price. When the government rumbled that, they hiked the peak price (all day apart from 0000-0700) as that was then effectively uncontrolled for those on Economy 7. A BBC journalist reported that the maximum price that could be charged from January 2023 was 34p per unit (how gullible can you get, believing the government’s propaganda?). A week or so later she apologised (no just kidding) but posted another article saying that people on Economy 7 were being ripped off for the day time rate. The small suppliers who abided by the government rules went bust and the big suppliers were asked to increase the standing charge to cover the debts they were asked to take on from the smaller suppliers. The larger suppliers can afford better (i.e. less honest) solicitors and sail closer to the wind as they know they are too big to fail. Where have I heard that before?

However, there is tax, and standing charge, and even tax on the tax.

I’d failed to take tax into account when I made my post above. Until a few months ago there was the base rate, then tax on top of it, but then you got a “prompt payment discount” that was almost the same value as the tax, so the pre-tax prices were effectively the price you paid.

Recently they scrapped the PPD and reduced the base rates (effectively giving the PPD to everyone) but that means that I now need to take the tax into account. My adjusted figures are therefore 16.17p/unit and 36p/day.

A BBC journalist reported that the maximum price that could be charged from January 2023 was 34p per unit

She should not have said that, but it is uderstandable given how complex the matter is. My Supplier, Ecotricity charges 47.34p for day units, clearly a lot more than 34p. However, the night unit charge is 21p. so the averag per diem charge per unit depends upon the ratio of day to night units used. The following spreadsheet shows how this works out for a number of different energy suppliers. For all of them the average cost per unit is below 34p if you are using 50/50 day and night units.

so the averag per diem charge per unit

The effect of making an average per diem unit price of 34p (max) and a £3000 per annum cost is (on Economy 7) either to inflate the day time price to exploit customers in the Summer or to make the night time discount lower (as they did originally when the cap was introduced). Making the night time discount lower has encouraged those with storage heaters to add newer heaters which are a little more efficient but designed to be on all day on a thermostat. As this is counter-productive to encouraging night time use they are now using a lower night time price and thus higher day time. It is amazing what you can get crooked solicitors to advise you is legal! The reason the night time rate is low is to encourage customers to use night storage (when electricity is cheap to generate). There was never an intention to inflate their day time rate – there only used to be a few pence difference in day unit price between Economy 7 and non-Economy 7.

Grief. 12c Canadian – about 8p in ununited kingdom tokens – for renewable energy here.

renewable energy here

Start up costs make renewables unattractive to the energy companies (looking for the short term profit) but the cost of the raw materials (sun, wind, waves,…) doesn’t go up when some megalomaniac starts to withhold supplies as a bargaining tool.
I’ve not heard of any likelihood of the source running out either.

If you want Cheap electricy go without.

If BT gets their way – no electricy – their fiber phone system won’t work!

I’ve added a UPS that keeps the phone base, router and fibre modem powered during power cuts, just in case. We do get the occasional trip as the power mostly runs overground on poles across the area – and quite a few storms.

UPS doesn’t help if the telephone exchange power goes down too! That seems normal for 75% of our power cuts (I too am on overhead power, 50m from transformer and the across-the-hillside 11kV line).

Had a fibre surveyor looking at the overhead infrastructure round these parts a couple of months ago and he was convinced Openreach are sticking to their schedule for copper cutoff, hence the urgency for getting out looking in rural spots rather than the previous Nah.

I saw the guys pulling fibre through the Openreach ducts opposite my house and asked them who they were doing it for. I was signed up an hour later and installed about a week later. Cheaper, faster and more reliable than BT, plus the option of a fixed IP that BT wouldn’t do for a residential customer. Variable IP addresses were playing havoc with my mail server as I’d end up on a blacklisted IP once in a while. Speeds go up to 1Gb, but I started on the lowest 150Mb for now – up and down.

I have a little 12V UPS for the Livebox, not so much to keep connectivity, but more because it glitches out at the tiniest brownout and takes ages to restart.

If the new hardware isn’t a single 12V 2A feed, I’m going to have to look at investing in a proper UPS.

Rural, tends to flicker at 6am and 6pm (or 7/7) just prior to when the farmers all start hooking up their milking machines…

UPS doesn’t help if the telephone exchange power goes down too!

It should have its own backup power source.

I remember in the storm of 1987, at boarding school, BT rigged up the phone service the very next day and made all phone calls free. It was a complex mess of wires snaked along roads. The reason for this, asides from half of the trees on the South Downs being wiped out, was that the local exchange had the batteries destroyed and their was no mains power (for about ten days), so they had to run in power from a nearby town.

Of course, our PE teacher, in his wisdom, told us all to go on “a woods run”. I took one look at it and was like “nope”. Bunked off in the dormitory. They had to get a search party for the ones that actually tried and got lost. The forestry commission’s subsequent bollocking was very satisfying. ;)

“Rural, tends to flicker at 6am and 6pm (or 7/7) just prior to when the farmers all start hooking up their milking machines…”

That’s what you call anticipation!

There’s a brief glitch as the power lines change somewhere, and a few minutes later the lights dim as the machines start kicking in.

It’s like in the UK, knowing what’s on TV on important days to anticipate when everybody will go turn the kettle on.

I saw the guys pulling fibre through the Openreach ducts opposite my house and asked them who they were doing it for. I was signed up an hour later and installed about a week later.

City Fibre seem to be on a fairly wide install program, the local village choice for broadband was previously anything-you-can-get-on-an-openreach FTTC feed, recent months saw a flood feed to every property frontage. Now people have that alternate of FTTP. Current offering is Vodaphone only, but supposedly other providers later.

Cheaper, faster and more reliable than BT, plus the option of a fixed IP that BT wouldn’t do for a residential customer.

It’s worth noting that Openreach fibre doesn’t mean BT as an ISP. I’ll be sending this over such fibre, and I’m fairly certain that BT aren’t my ISP (or phone supplier, over the attached copper pair, for that matter).

There’s a fixed IP address involved, too.

This is definitely a non-Openreach installation. I specifically asked the guys running the fibre. I know all about Openreach and them being the wholesale provider used by BT, TalkTalk, Sky, Plusnet and a host of others as I deal with them regularly as part of my – soon to finish – job in the telecoms industry. My lot are YouFibre, similar to City Fibre who also roll their own network. My exchange isn’t down for FTTP from BT for a while yet.

This is definitely a non-Openreach installation.

Of course. I was just responding to your implication that by being “not Openreach”, it allowed you to avoid using BT as your ISP; you can do that with Openreach as your FTTP infrastructure provider, too.

I remember in the storm of 1987, at boarding school, BT rigged up the phone service the very next day and made all phone calls free. It was a complex mess of wires snaked along roads. The reason for this, asides from half of the trees on the South Downs being wiped out, was that the local exchange had the batteries destroyed and their was no mains power (for about ten days), so they had to run in power from a nearby town.

A fortnight on from the cyclone there are still lots of outages here (it even takes a few seconds to load due to how many there are). Fibre has proved a lot more resilient than copper in that regard.