Wednesday
Mar272013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Spend to save
Mar 27, 2013 Climate: Parliament Energy: costs Ed Davey's statement on energy costs is getting a great deal of attention, and I think it's fair to say that nobody is impressed:
£286 green tax on energy bills: But ministers insist 'efficient appliances' will SAVE us money
- Energy Secretary insisted households will be better off due to initiatives
- But families will only benefit if they buy more efficient domestic appliances
- Average bill is now £1,267 with £112 of that amount going on green taxes
- By 2020 green taxes will have risen by over 150 per cent - £286 per family
- DECC reckons households will be saving £452 a year then due to schemes
- Charity said government 'embarrassed by terrifying cost of green policies'
- Claimed it is 'covering up' with a 'whitewash of wildly optimistic assumptions'
Reader Comments (77)
Our 30 year old boiler (complete with Death Star-like, planet-destroying pilot light) is serviced annualy under a British Gas contract.
The last guy who came out told us he was obliged to tick all of the boxes on the service form pointing out that it was in the lowest efficiency caetgory, that spare parts were becoming hard to find, and that we could save £x's per year by having a "modern efficient" boiler fitted.
"Don't tell that I told you this" says he, all conspiratorial like.
"But hang on to that until it expires. It's a good little boiler and the new ones are crap."
I came in on the tail-end of the interview with would-you-buy-a-used-car-from-this-man Ed Davey - and could not believe that he's still trotting out the 'tackling climate change' mantra....
For goodness' sake change the record..!
Actually, it was the owners of the Darwin Awards who bought it, in order to showcase a really big dumb national self-extinction.
David:
Changing the records is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I might be wrong on this, but I’m sure I read a report recently that showed that the “greedy” energy companies actually made less than a pound profit per week per household (£50 per annum) and that most of their charges went into fuel extraction, transportation, generation and distribution. If that’s true, then £50 a year doesn’t seem to me to be excessive. Your local supermarket probably makes that out of you every month. Also if true, then I would imagine that it doesn’t really give them a lot of leeway in reducing their own profits in order to help their customers and further, might damage their own ability to adequately reinvest for the future. My point is, if we were all to follow DECC’s recommendations and do all those things to cut our consumption and by some miracle we all actually succeeded and cut total consumption by say 10%, what would the energy companies then have to do?
I might be wrong on this, but I’m sure I read a report recently that showed that the “greedy” energy companies actually made less than a pound profit per week per household (£50 per annum) and that most of their charges went into fuel extraction, transportation, generation and distribution.
Mar 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM | Laurie Childs
The problem with this is the smoke and mirrors hiding behind different parts of the same company, the exploration/extraction side are kept apart from the rest, so when the gas price goes up they increase the charges to the consumer and pass the increase back to a different company. They profit from higher prices but the accounts of the company you purchase from do not show it.
TerryS'
"Despite all of the governments efforts, electricity usage shows no sign of decreasing so what makes them think it will decrease in the future?"
I'd guess that comparatively little electricity is used for heating in the UK and that makes up the bulk of the gas figure. Efficiency measures such as insulation will have little impact.
Mostly, electricity is used for cooking, lighting, running motors and electronics. The savings are comparatively slight and at the cost of added inconvenience.
The economics of chucking out your old appliances for newer more energy efficient ones generally make no sense, especially since the newer stuff tends to be unrepairable and doesn't last as long. There is of course the environment to think about when scrapping appliances before their time is up.
Then of course there are all the new gadgets we are encouraged to buy, bread makers, pressure washers, electric cement mixers, all at reasonable cost. Who the hell is going to want to mix any quantity of cement by hand these days?
Morph, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:17 AM,
"Caroline Flint, Labour’s energy spokesman, said last night: ‘The Government’s underhand attempt to mask the real impact of its policies on families’ energy bills is shameful."
And who brought in the CCA Ms. Flint ?
========================
"I have read some of [the Lisbon Treaty] but not all of it."
(Caroline Flint, former Minister for Europe)
Tells us as much as we need to know about Caroline Flint.
I'm no fan of Gordon Brown, but at least in some cases his judgement was sound.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8086314.stm
Re: BoFA
European competition rules mean they cannot subsidise what they sell to the consumer with the profits they make from its extraction. This leads to the situation whereby Tesco can subsidise the sale of petrol with the profits from selling groceries but BP cannot subsidise petrol with the profits from extraction.
You won't actually save a penny because even though you might use 10 times less energy the Das fact is the energy you do use will cost you 10 times more than it did before.
Mailman
BoFA, TerryS,
I wouldn’t attempt to dispute what either of you say. Even if I wanted to, I just don’t know enough about it to make any kind of informed argument. My main point though, was that whatever savings any of us make in terms of reduced consumption, will simply be negated by increased charges by the power companies as they endeavour to maintain their level of profitability.
Mailman - Snap ;)
@TinyCO2
"While not a condensing boiler, I’ve got an efficient boiler ad will only replace this one when it breaks beyond repair."
I have a condensing boiler and it has saved me a small fortune. It doesn't work in cold weather and so it is currently broken!
The only downside is the ubiquity of brass monkeys.
I caught an interview on You and Yours with some consumer body mouthpiece and he was distinctly unimpressed. If even BBC Radio 4 can't bring itself to wheel on a Greenpeace/WWF drone to enthuse about a green report, however egregious, it must really be doing a Hindenburg,
@meltemian
"Are you sure the energy savings calculations weren't done by UEA??"
Oh no! They haven't been letting Phil play with Excel again?
Scrap the green costs and keep the savings (they're unconnected) and we'd all be £700 better off.
Lest we forget:
John Prescott forced through condensing boilers in 2005,
and,
Gordon Brown sold Westinghouse to Toshiba in 2007,
and,
Baroness Blackout wrote CCA 2008,
and,
Edward Miliband forced it through into law,
and,
C. Huhne made it worse,
and,
Edward Davey made it even worse.
Let's not forget that the "improved efficiency" of some modern stuff means that they chuck out less heat. Light bulbs are the obvious example: if I were to convert my old-style downlighters to new LEDs or whatever I would lose about 500W or more of heat. That's about the same as a rad for a small room. Cost-wise I would have to replace all the fittings, not just the bulbs, and probably have to refurb the ceilings,so the payback would run to millenia.
It sounds as if these "savings" are predicated on massive increases in the cost of gas.
But what happens if the cost goes down (as many commentators anticipate)?
Where would a "Green Deal" house seller stand if, in say 5 - 10 years time, gas prices have fallen, taking power costs with them along the lines of the US experience? Any buyer would look at the outstanding GD loan and decide it was not cost effective so should be cut off the price.
artwest
The Consumer Focus spokesman said Ed Davey had made some 'heroic assumptions'. I'm still chuckling.
I have one of those old-style boilers that's just a big tank with a heating element in it that comes on over night. It broke down in the summer. I just got it fixed today. I delayed getting it fixed to save a bit of money on my electricity bill. Probably not the sort of thing that Ed Davey has to worry about.
The only conclusions I can take from Ed Davey's startling pronouncements are that
a) Ed Davey is irredeemably stupid
b) Ed Davey is convinced that the UK public is even more stupid than Ed Davey
c) Almost all UK politicians of the LibLabCon varieties dislike/feel utter disdain for their constituents
Anyone who thinks that smart meters are to enable you to monitor and control your energy consumption is naïve.
Smart meters are to enable pricing of energy in 30 minute periods (Smart Metering Technical Specification paragraph 5.3.7.1) so that peak usage periods can be used to throttle demand by price and make a healthy profit from those who cannot afford to pay close attention to the price changes. People in California (the Land of Fruits and Nuts) already pay up to $0.93 per kWh during peak air conditioning periods.
They can also enable demand control by remote load shedding.
They will also enable all sorts of new electronic crime.
Pension problem solved, what your 80 and can't afford your heating well just shut your eyes and let the numb take you.
Mar 27, 2013 at 1:17 PM Mike Jackson
Mike,
Out of interest, how does your cost of hot water compare with what it would be with an electric ballon chauf-eau run on heures creuses electricity?
No maintenance and total cost less than 200€.
Are you on town gas or liquid gas?
Martin A
The simple answer to your question (off-hand) is "dunno"!
I'll get Madame La Ministre de Finance to do the calculations — I leave important things like that to her while I do simple things like putting the world to rights!
We have town gas for heating, hot water, and cooking. I don't know whether the upheaval of changing the whole system would be worth the effort even given a decent level of savings, especially at our age.
Mike - it will be interesting to see Mme. Jackson's figures.
I imagine that town gas is reasonably economical. When I started renovation my house in Normandy some years back I compared the costs of alternate sources of heat and was surprised to find that liquid gas (no town gas here) was about the same as for daytime electricity. I told the gas firm to come and get their pressure tank. (It's dangerous stuff, too.)
My neighbour pointed out that the cost of installing oil or gas central heating would pay for several years of heating by electricity.
In the end, I opted for electric heating (installation cost trivial), electric hot water (installation cost very low and running on nighttime juice) plus a big wood stove downstairs which I light when feel energetic enough - which after a day of work outside is not often. (A lot easier to tweak the thermostat and have 6kW of electric heating kick in in the main living area,)
The hot water tank is fed from a meter (bought on Ebay) identical to an EDF meter - I must take a look and see how much juice I have used for hot water/