Where are the spot prices for UK gas published?

1carminestocky

mech wrote: »

Well I'm a heretic that didn't believe all the pointless cynicism in the summer about fixed tariffs being a rip off. So I went for Scottish Power Fixed price 2011. Never available in Ireland obviously.

The Irish are now paying 62% more than me for gas. My god how these utility companies rip me off. I feel exploited.

Thank you. And what tariff is your friend in Ireland on, please?

Cardew

mech wrote: »

Well I'm a heretic that didn't believe all the pointless cynicism in the summer about fixed tariffs being a rip off. So I went for Scottish Power Fixed price 2011.

There I was thinking you were a British Gas employee as well as(allegedly) several other posters on this forum - and got your gas and electricity for free.

mech_2

1carminestocky wrote: »

Thank you. And what tariff is your friend in Ireland on, please?

She's just on the standard Bord Gais residential tariff. I've just looked at their website and there are a couple of other tariffs, but they all come to within a few euros of each other.

Also I was wrong about there being no competition. It says the Irish gas supply market was opened up to competition a year ago, but so far there's only one alternative called Flogas. I looked at their prices and they would be about 50 euros less per year, so several percent cheaper (3.5%ish). I will let her know.

beingjdc

There's a rather good graph of the last couple of years, and futures, of the UK NBP gas price on the FT site today. It's in dollars though so you need to adjust last year's peak down and the current price up to get a number that would affect UK domestic prices.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/11/03/17745/when-winter-means-a-smaller-gas-bill/

I think the only applicable word is 'volatile'.

ricky9

From the times online today A large post but a 6 to 9 month time lag.
It’s not only banks that are asking investors for billions of pounds these days. Last week Centrica, the energy company behind British Gas, tapped its shareholders for £2.2 billion in what will be one of the biggest rights issues outside financial services this year.
Unlike the banks, Centrica doesn’t need the money to save itself from destruction. In a harking-back to precredit crunch times, Centrica wants the cash to invest in a new business. City institutions are relieved. “They [Centrica’s large shareholders] have all said thank goodness you are here to talk about that and not another recapitalisation,” said Sam Laidlaw, Centrica’s chief executive.
The new business in question, nuclear power, should finally tackle the problem that has dogged Centrica for years - the mismatch between the size of its retail arm (it sells energy to 20m customers) and its relatively puny power-generating capacity. The disparity between the businesses has made the company vulnerable to swings in energy prices, forcing it into an uncomfortable squeeze between the demands of its power suppliers and its customers.
Laidlaw vowed to fix the problem when he took the top job two years ago, and the opportunity has finally presented itself. Centrica plans to buy a one-quarter stake in British Energy (BE), Britain’s only generator of electricity from nuclear power stations.
It will purchase the stake from Electricit! de France (EDF), the giant French utility group that last month agreed to buy BE for a little over £12 billion. EDF will form a new holding company in the UK and Centrica will pay £3.1 billion for 25% of it. The plan was revealed by The Sunday Times in May after Centrica’s own efforts to buy BE came to naught.
The British group will also take a quarter share of the new nuclear power stations EDF plans to build here. The French group intends to construct two twin-reactor plants, one at Hinkley Point and one at Size-well. Centrica will have an option to participate in their development “from the ground floor”, said Laidlaw.
Centrica will not get guaranteed access to the power produced by the BE stations but its exposure to power generation through the shareholding – and the profits the new company will generate – will give it what Laidlaw terms “a structural hedge”.
Neil Woodford, fund manager at Invesco Perpetual, which owns 4.5% of Centrica, said he was delighted by the Centrica plan. “It’s not immediately earnings enhancing but should lead to a rerating of the company because it removes that imbalance between retail and power generation. It increases the value of the business,” he said.
Laidlaw’s target is to have Centrica generating about half its power and gas in-house. Two years ago it was only about 25%, mainly from Centrica’s own UK gasfields. Since then the company has bought more gas, taking it to 35% as it races against the rapid dwindling of the reserves in its huge Morecambe gas fields in the Irish Sea.
“Nuclear will take our structural hedge from 35% to 45%. Ideally we would like to get ourselves to a little over 50%. The rights issue, together with any asset sales if we choose to do them, should allow us to buy more gas assets to get us past the 50% mark,” he said.
Some analysts have raised questions about how safe it is to rely on power from existing BE stations. They are old and have been prone to unexpected shutdowns.
“We’ve been cautious in our forecast outputs,” said Laidlaw. “The fleet is old and it is one-of-a-kind technology, but it has been safely and prudently managed.”
BE’s creaking fleet of nuclear reactors is not the company’s only worry. The credit crunch has finally found its way to the utility sector. Laidlaw was forced to postpone a separate £1.5 billion fundraising effort this month. Centrica had hoped to first raise debt and then attract either private-equity or infrastructure investors to help fund its £3 billion programme to build a portfolio of offshore wind farms. “We’ll come back to that in the first quarter of next year,” he said.
Ministers have shown little sympathy for the difficulty that the financial crisis has caused for utilities. Gordon Brown has called for energy companies to pass on the plummeting price of oil to consumers in the form of lower energy bills. Gas and power prices are closely linked to oil. Wholesale gas contracts, however, are bought on a forward basis and thus tend to lag six to nine months behind the movement in the oil price, Laidlaw said.
That is bad news for customers hoping for some relief this winter. “As soon as sustainable wholesale gas prices come down we’ll follow them down. But the reality is, and we have explained this to the government, wholesale gas prices for the first quarter [of 2009] are 77p per therm, compared to 48p this time last year. Hopefully in six to nine months’ time wholesale gas prices will come down and that will give us the opportunity to move on retail prices, but it’s too early to call.”
Getting a slice of BE’s output will help to shield Centrica from the swings in the wholesale gas market, but it does not address a more fundamental issue. Centrica looks increasingly isolated in an industry that has come to be dominated by a handful of acquisition-minded continental giants like EDF, Iberdrola and RWE.
Every one of Centrica’s UK rivals, bar Scottish & Southern, has been gobbled up in recent years. Laidlaw has spent the past two years building up defences: establishing a high-margin services business, increasing its presence in North America and Belgium, and now the BE deal.
Will it be enough for Centrica to keep its independence?
“I think so,” said Laidlaw. “We’re changing the model. It’s a very different model than all other utilities because it’s deregulated. It’s higher risk but it has been, and I think will continue to be, higher return.”

Mazio_2

ricky9 an extremly good post and I hope centrica honour this and not just talk about it and hope that in the summer with bills lowering consumers / goverment and the media forget and pressure for them to act decreases.
Also it looks like their statements in all the media about 70% increase in prices for this year now were to fund the project iam afriad I need actual proof of this lowering not just statements of intent if indeed it does happen (price reduction).
At least they are starting to upgrade the infrastructure to safeguard future fluctuations.
But none the less thankyou for this.

Mazio_2

According to earth trends website Ireland uses around 34% gas of this it doesnt say how much is used in residential so is gas used as a primary heat source or is it coal / oil (66%) although this has gone up too.
Most countries were the price is high for certain commodities usualy means they dont use much or need much because of the climate or they have another cheaper option.

In the 70s I think when North sea oil was started to be used the government of the time told everybody we were in for cheap power they converted everybody from coal gas so no going back in this country coal was the cheaper and abundant source . The cost to the consumer never went down and the government profited.
At the end of the day we will see how much profit the utility companies post.

1carminestocky

mech wrote: »

She's just on the standard Bord Gais residential tariff. I've just looked at their website and there are a couple of other tariffs, but they all come to within a few euros of each other.

Also I was wrong about there being no competition. It says the Irish gas supply market was opened up to competition a year ago, but so far there's only one alternative called Flogas. I looked at their prices and they would be about 50 euros less per year, so several percent cheaper (3.5%ish). I will let her know.

Ahhh...I see. So, you were comparing a fixed product that is no longer available with your friend's 'most expensive tariff in Ireland'? :rolleyes: Hmmm...reason I was asking is that I've just worked out my next door neighbour is currently paying 50% more for his gas than I am. Going by your theory, does that mean that people in the UK pay 50% more for their gas than, err, people in the UK? :rolleyes: Funnily enough, he's not complaining, either (I've tried countless times to get him off that awful standard rate but to no avail)..

mech_2

Mazio wrote: »

According to earth trends website Ireland uses around 34% gas of this it doesnt say how much is used in residential so is gas used as a primary heat source or is it coal / oil (66%) although this has gone up too.
Most countries were the price is high for certain commodities usualy means they dont use much or need much because of the climate or they have another cheaper option.

Well I would say low demand creates lower prices usually. Look at Greece's gas prices. Ireland has the problem that it's linked to the UK's gas markets and we are the largest consumer of gas in Europe and running out of our own reserves.

Ireland has a lot of peat. You can burn blocks of it on an open fire. I don't know if this is cheaper than gas.

In the 70s I think when North sea oil was started to be used the government of the time told everybody we were in for cheap power they converted everybody from coal gas so no going back in this country coal was the cheaper and abundant source.

Gas was and is cheaper than imported coal, never mind UK coal. That's why Thatcher closed the coal pits. They were uneconomical.

The cost to the consumer never went down and the government profited.
At the end of the day we will see how much profit the utility companies post.

Please recheck the figures. UK electricity prices tumbled almost constantly for nearly 2 decades due to the dash for gas.

mech_2

1carminestocky wrote: »

Ahhh...I see. So, you were comparing a fixed product that is no longer available with your friend's 'most expensive tariff in Ireland'? :rolleyes:

I was comparing the UK average to a typical Irish utility bill and concluded that it was 28% more expensive in Ireland. If we bring Flogas into the equation it's still 26% more expensive, but now we're comparing the cheapest tariff in Ireland to the UK average. The Irish tariffs are all much much closer to each other than ours in the UK. It really doesn't make the comparison seem any better if I compare to Flogas. There's still no "Supplier switching" industry to support and the larger state-owned supplier is undercut by the only independant competitor.

http://www.flogasnaturalgas.ie/FG0003633_Tariff_Brochure_Sep08.pdf

Comparison with Scottish Power Pricefix 2011 seems perfectly valid in my view. Lots of perfectly ordinary people in the UK are paying this rate. No one in Ireland is. Even when it was available in the UK it wasn't available in Ireland. Even if I compare with the cheapest rate available in Ireland and add in the standing charges and use a poorer exchange rate than today's, it's still more than 50% more expensive in Ireland than what I'm paying. Find a tariff in Ireland that is cheaper and I'll admit I'm wrong. Doing your usual thing of discrediting the messenger doesn't change the facts. It just makes you look like a fool.

Hmmm...reason I was asking is that I've just worked out my next door neighbour is currently paying 50% more for his gas than I am. Going by your theory, does that mean that people in the UK pay 50% more for their gas than, err, people in the UK? :rolleyes:

It means we have a competitive market where we have the choice of shopping around for a good deal if we want to. Your neighbour is probably paying close to Irish prices. Would you prefer it if the utility companies were nationalised and both you and your neighbour paid what he's paying now?

You still don't seem to be grasping the implications of the comparison. Much less shooting it down in flames. But be smug if it makes you happier.