Energy news in general

JKenH

It is interesting looking at this from a statistical point of view as OFGEM look at the median consumer. What a millionaire does in his 500sqm house or what a singleton living in a small flat does are unlikely to impact the median. My quite wealthy next door neighbour ditched his hot tub but still leaves the ground mounted floodlights on. I doubt that hot tub owners constitute the median consumer but they could, of course, have been above the median before ditching the hot tub and below the median afterwards. That could have an impact as the household
that was using 1kWh below the median as now been bumped up to be the median.

Weren’t the heated throws a reaction to the 2022 energy crisis? Yes we are consuming less but are these behavioural changes we are adopting just a short term reaction to higher prices and will consumption increase if prices fall again? I have been a lot less careful since I went onto Octopus Go in January and since March have been paying just 4.99p/kWh for the energy to heat my hot water and fill my battery. I haven’t even worried about the cost of aircon (20kWh) as except for a couple of days I have needed to buy any peak rate electricity. With export rates falling I feel less inhibited about self consuming solar.

With more EVs and heat pumps being rolled out we would expect electricity use to be increasing not dectreasing but again EV and heat pumps being users are likely to be way to one side of the median so not impacting the statistic. Possibly rolling out more roof mounted solar panels is shifting the median down as may plug in solar. LED bulbs were probably the biggest factor historically in bringing median electricity use down as everybody bought these but the low hanging fruit has already been picked.

Edit; I suspect the big driver to cut energy consumption was the email from their energy supplier telling them their direct debit was rising and at the same time consumers were told to turn their thermostats down. Hence, my suggestion that rising prices is the biggest driver of the reduced TDCV rather than wide scale improvement to the thermal efficiency of the housing stock.