Panel of Supreme Justices refused the Government leave to appeal - 43.3p confirmed

Numbnuts

EricMears wrote: »

Take yourself back to item #1 of this thread. Or to save a little scrolling, I'll remind you of the thread title : "Panel of Supreme Justices refused the Government leave to appeal "

Doesn't that give you just the merest inkling that the Government might have an interest in this scheme ?

Whilst the RECs are indeed collecting the levies from all customers and dispensing FIT payments to those qualifying, they do both as agents of the Government and (as noted above) receive some admin costs for so doing. Were it simply a whim of their own, RECs would be free to pay as much as they like to as many mini-generators as they want and recover the whole of that cost from their customers.

I've said it before but it will stand repeating: the Government don't actually pay for anything; they collect cash from one set of people and transfer it to another. Your Old Age Pension won't actually be a gift from DWP, it will be collected on your behalf from NI contributors by the DWP and paid out to you.

I'm not entirely sure how the payments from consumers are calculated but strongly suspect that they'll be related to the unit cost of electricity - i.e. the poorest consumers struggling to light a couple of rooms may not have to pay quite as much as the wealthy estate with a couple of megawatts of "Son et Lumiere" to fund. But in any case, we worked out in another thread that the average household will be paying something in the low teens of pounds per annum to fund the FIT scheme; coincidentally much the same as it would cost the Government to pay fines to Brussels should we fail to meet their Green Energy targets. You might think that cabinet ministers should have a whip-round amongst themselves to pay such a fine but I can confidently predict they'll decide to collect it from the general population (but probably with higher rate taxpayers chipping in a bit more than the poorest in society).

do we still have 19 MW to install before 2020???

Martyn1981

EricMears wrote: »

I'm not entirely sure how the payments from consumers are calculated but strongly suspect that they'll be related to the unit cost of electricity - i.e. the poorest consumers struggling to light a couple of rooms may not have to pay quite as much as the wealthy estate with a couple of megawatts of "Son et Lumiere" to fund. But in any case, we worked out in another thread that the average household will be paying something in the low teens of pounds per annum to fund the FIT scheme; coincidentally much the same as it would cost the Government to pay fines to Brussels should we fail to meet their Green Energy targets. You might think that cabinet ministers should have a whip-round amongst themselves to pay such a fine but I can confidently predict they'll decide to collect it from the general population (but probably with higher rate taxpayers chipping in a bit more than the poorest in society).

Eric, I will try to find a definitive and concise answer, but in the meantime my understanding is that the Green Tariff pretty much represents an additional percentage on peoples energy bills. I believe 10% on electricity and 4%? on gas.

So, yes, you are right that the more you use the more you pay. This and the previous government (I think) have tried to introduce measures to help lower paid households, such as the requirement that 'pay as you go' tariffs (can't remember there proper names) must be equal to the lower rates etc, etc.

Normally I'd support an economic argument for energy that supply and demand should dictate pricing, however (and I can't really believe how much my views have changed over the last 10 years) now that energy use has a detrimental effect on all of us, but especially poorer households, I now disagree with the way energy is priced.

Currently the more you use, the less you pay. The first units are usually more to cover fixed costs. After that we move onto tier 2 prices that are less. Surely now, and I apologise for sounding preachy and liberal, but surely now we should take some responsibility for excessive consumption by having rising prices when demand exceeds average , or perhaps higher than average consumption.

If the cost of high consumption went up (and as long as those with certain high consumption needs are protected), you can bet that consumption would drop simply because people will think about what they are doing. If demand during peak times is reduced we would all see the benefit as annual prices reflect an average of all prices, but are affected more by expensive peak consumption.

Mart.