Friday, Aug 29, 2008
This should help the cost of living!
TIMESONLINE: Energy groups increase pain with gas price rises
Npower and ScottishPower today became the last of Britain's big six energy suppliers to raise gas and electricity bills, adding at least another £162 a year to millions of customers’ heating costs.
Npower, the UK’s fourth-biggest energy group, will increase gas prices by 26 per cent and electricity bills by 14 per cent.
From today, the company’s 6.6 million customers will pay an average £162 more each year for gas and an extra £60 for electricity.
At the same time, ScottishPower has raised its gas bills by 34 per cent, the second largest rise after British Gas increased its gas prices by 35 per cent last month.
ScottishPower also announced today that it has increased its electricity prices by 9 per cent, which will come into effect on September 1st
4 Comments
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1. handle_it said...
No windfall taxes - just in case we upset foreign investors.
2. drewster said...
Yes, curse those evil investors, especially the foreign ones. Let's blame them instead of recognising our domestic energy problems....
3. Ilejustwait said...
the BOE cutting interest rates will make no difference to the economy, house prices will come down its inevitable, by how much no one now for sure, but we can see that we are all spending more money on fuel, utility bills, and food etc, they just keep going up and up, any savings made on any interest rate cut will be spoken for by other bills going up,
4. Kruador said...
We saw the reason for this about a week ago. The press publicised a leaking gas pipe in Norway that supplies 5% of their production, which will now be taken out of action to repair it and it'll take six months to come back online. According to the CIA's estimates, Norway produces 83bn cubic metres of gas, while they consume 5.3bn cubic metres. On the other hand, we consume 91.1bn cubic metres and produce 84.1 cubic metres. (All 2005 estimates). The speculators panicked and drove up the price of the winter months' futures to double their previous prices.
A couple of days ago, the September contract expired, leaving October as the front month; October had already been ramped up to ridiculous levels.
The answer is not windfall taxes but to fix the markets to remove speculation beyond that required to provide liquidity for genuine physical traders. Banning cashing-in of contracts would be a great start.