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Martyn1981

pile-o-stone wrote: »

Taking that argument further you could say that people in rural or sparsely populated communities should pay more because it costs more to supply them due to longer cable runs and greater potential to damage in exposed areas. It starts getting complex if we have to factor in lots of variables, so a fixed fee would probably be cheaper to administer.

This already happens.

Edit - Just to be clear, my main reason for supporting a 'petrol forecourt' price isn't actually about fair distribution of costs - I have no objection to the standing charge on my water bill prior to the metered units, which is actually low.

My main position is the one that Z and SW have raised, which is the need to make the marginal cost of energy more expensive. A higher unit price will encourage people to reduce waste, it'll encourage energy saving spending as it will give a faster payback on say the £20 more expensive telly that consumes less watts, and it improves the economics of self/distributed generation.

Again, given that almost everything we buy has the fixed costs rolled in, standing charges are actually the anomaly, and removing them is no big deal. In fact, only high users would 'suffer', since an average user should see no net change to their bill total, and low users would pay less. So high users would be penalised for using 'too much' leccy, and having a higher impact on the infrastructure.

pile-o-stone

Martyn1981 wrote: »

My main position is the one that Z and SW have raised, which is the need to make the marginal cost of energy more expensive. A higher unit price will encourage people to reduce waste, it'll encourage energy saving spending as it will give a faster payback on say the £20 more expensive telly that consumes less watts, and it improves the economics of self/distributed generation.

The problem with this is that it will unfairly hit those who are poorer, who are more likely to live in energy inefficient housing stock and who may be renting and so have no power to improve the property (even if they could afford to). Those on key meters who already have higher bills will be hit with a double whammy.

I'm assuming that you'd use the monies raised with the increased unit price to help out those people negatively impacted by the increase such as funding energy improvements, rather than allow the energy companies to just pocket the money and make themselves richer.

The trouble is how do you administer this? Your higher prices won't just hit those on benefits, it will also hit the 'just about managing', young people just starting out in their careers who are already under a burden of trying to pay student loans and save for deposits on high house prices, it'll hit young families who have high child care costs. How do these apply for assistance? Are we to add even more people on the benefit system? You'd have to increase the unit price significantly just to cover the increase in civil service administration to make these additional benefit payments.

silverwhistle

I was going to agree with Martyn, particularly his last paragraph, and write a post with a similar point to yours about housing standards.


But they are different issues, and by and large those on benefits are already, perforce, low users. They aren't the ones who will be hit by this and if we are concerned about this issue then we need to deal with those root issues.



The real problem, as we have seen this week over the Grenfell Tower demonstrations two years on, is that the current government doesn't give a toss about such people.

GreatApe

pile-o-stone wrote: »

The problem with this is that it will unfairly hit those who are poorer, who are more likely to live in energy inefficient housing stock and who may be renting and so have no power to improve the property (even if they could afford to). Those on key meters who already have higher bills will be hit with a double whammy.

I'm assuming that you'd use the monies raised with the increased unit price to help out those people negatively impacted by the increase such as funding energy improvements, rather than allow the energy companies to just pocket the money and make themselves richer.

The trouble is how do you administer this? Your higher prices won't just hit those on benefits, it will also hit the 'just about managing', young people just starting out in their careers who are already under a burden of trying to pay student loans and save for deposits on high house prices, it'll hit young families who have high child care costs. How do these apply for assistance? Are we to add even more people on the benefit system? You'd have to increase the unit price significantly just to cover the increase in civil service administration to make these additional benefit payments.

Electricity needs to become significantly cheaper to electrify heating and most likely this will be via simple resistance heating. Heat pumps are unlikely to be affordable both upfront and to run (else countries like Norway Sweden would be using heat pumps but instead they use resistance heating)

So far the UK green costs have been negligible because a lot of the greening has been done by efficiency (eg LED lights and more efficient appliances and things like going from a 300 watt desktop to a 5 watt tablet) which saved money. Likewise although wind mills and PV farms have added to costs, the inter-connectors built and under construction will reduce costs and import mostly green nuclear/hydro power

But the next stage is going to be costly, there is no cheap way to move away from NG heating to electrical heating and the idea of expensive electricity = good will cripple the conversion of heating from FF to electricity

GreatApe

silverwhistle wrote: »

The real problem, as we have seen this week over the Grenfell Tower demonstrations two years on, is that the current government doesn't give a toss about such people.

Money doesn't grow on trees

To spend more on x you need to tax more or spend less elsewhere

Housing standards for the poor can be improved, so long as you are willing to tax people more to make it happen. We can switch from fossil fuels to green power so long as you are willing for people to pay more for electricity so they have less money to spend on other needs/wants

Spending other peoples money is easy but there comes a point when other people say hold on a minute and vote in who they assume to be better custodians of their limited finances

Like it or not, the average person does not want to pay more in taxes or pay higher prices so that someone 'poor' can live in a better house while they have to live a life of fewer goods and services to fund this

Why even have government in the mix. Team up with 5 other not poor households on your street and Go find someone poor on your street and offer to lag their loft and build them an extension via your own funds as a gift to them. If you dont want to do it directly why do you want it done indirectly?

1961Nick

GreatApe wrote: »

But the next stage is going to be costly, there is no cheap way to move away from NG heating to electrical heating and the idea of expensive electricity = good will cripple the conversion of heating from FF to electricity

How about installing more windmills & solar farms & using the surplus energy to produce hydrogen?

GreatApe

1961Nick wrote: »

How about installing more windmills & solar farms & using the surplus energy to produce hydrogen?

It makes no economic sense whatsoever and while costs can improve we cant beat the laws of thermodynamics. You dont turn high grade fuel (electricity) to low grade fuel (chemical).

We can do electrical heating. Offshore wind farms in the UK get about 50% CF in the winter months and spread out over the UK correlation might be 75% so about 65% of heating can be provided via direct electrical heating of homes/businesses via offshore wind power

The other 35% of heating will have to be covered by biomass/nuclear/interconnector-imports/pumped-hydro and yes keeping NG in the mix

If EVs become successful then maybe this 65:35 ratio could be closer to 70:30 ratio

This remaining 30% of heating is going to be very difficult to solve

Perhaps biomass fired power stations fitted with CCS (which would be negative carbon) (possible but unlikely imo)

Or perhaps homes/offices that are willing to be curtailed (ie accept ~30% of the winter days you have no or limited heating) but get offered a cheaper rate (Quite likely)

Or perhaps build solar farms in the world where output correlates to demand, that would mean for the uk we would need to import solar from somewhere in the southern hemisphere so lots of output during the uk winter. We would need 50GW+ link to the southern hemisphere and something like 100GW capacity of PV down there with also big batteries. (I dont think this is at all likely!)

Or yes hydrogen production to fill in this 30% gap (extremely unlikely and will be costly very costly)

Martyn1981

pile-o-stone wrote: »

I'm assuming that you'd use the monies raised with the increased unit price

There would be no monies raised, in fact, a higher unit price would hopefully reduce total demand, and therefore total revenue/expenditure.

Martyn1981

pile-o-stone wrote: »

Your higher prices won't just hit those on benefits, it will also hit the 'just about managing', young people just starting out in their careers who are already under a burden of trying to pay student loans and save for deposits on high house prices, it'll hit young families who have high child care costs. How do these apply for assistance? Are we to add even more people on the benefit system? You'd have to increase the unit price significantly just to cover the increase in civil service administration to make these additional benefit payments.

My higher prices? On average bills would stay the same, but those using less, would pay less.

All of your post is based on you not understanding what it is being proposed, and then trying to suggest it somehow impacts on the poorer among us.


If you didn't like that idea of mine, then you'll hate this one - put the VAT rate up from 5% to 20%, as we need to encourage a reduction in energy consumption, and an increased take up of energy saving, insulation, reduced waste etc.

In that case (and I have detailed this before, so you can check), I'd ring fence the 15% additional VAT and use it to fund energy saving, insulation etc, and help those in fuel poverty. I'd suggest that we could very quickly reduce everyone's energy consumption by 15%, thereby avoiding any net bill increase, and reduce CO2 emissions too.

It might be favourable to have some sort of reduced VAT rate for the low carbon element of the energy provided, so someone on a 100% green leccy tariff would remain on 5%, or even less.

Martyn1981

1961Nick wrote: »

How about installing more windmills & solar farms & using the surplus energy to produce hydrogen?

Also, having taken the COP into account, heat pump leccy running costs could well be less than GCH gas costs.