Energy Company Bankruptcy?

Steveglw

Today when I was waiting in a queue to order my coffee I overhead an interesting conversation. They were chatting about the movement of people who are planning to cancel their direct debit and was asking the other if there would be any damage to their credit rating?

The conversation then changed to re-nationalising the energy companies then I heard
"well its going to be expensive to buy back the energy companies so it would be cheaper for the government if the public just refused to pay their bills then the companies would go bankrupt and the government would get them back anyway free of charge!"

Is this correct as I don't understand how a government could just take over failed companies without having to renumerate share-holders? 
Thanks 

Richiem1987

If people stopped paying, then the Utility companies have the power via courts to put in pre-payment meters and load the debt onto that, so to use any energy, you would have to settle the debt first. If you are on a smart meter, they can do this without even entering your property. There are exceptions of course where there is a risk to life, but that is on a case by case basis. All utility companies are at risk, especially over the winter, which is why National Grid may implement load shedding over peak periods to avoid buying energy at the highest prices. 

pochase

Have a look at Bulb, they are in administration with the government.

I would not call more than £2 billion that they have cost us already free of charge. And that is for 1.9 million households.

Also there will be administrators that will be chasing for the outstanding money from those who did not pay, this debt is not just gone.

[Deleted User]

There are plenty of ill-informed (or deliberately obtuse) utopian thinkers around, who seem to think that we could just nationalise everything and all our problems would just go away.  In their minds, a nationalised energy company could somehow get free fuel from the oil companies (which aren't British), wouldn't need to pay anything to the generators or transmission companies (which aren't British), and everything would be rosy.

The suppliers aren't making much money at the moment anyway, but because they're the name on the bill then everyone focuses in the wrong place.

sienew

pochase said:

Have a look at Bulb, they are in administration with the government.

I would not call more than £2 billion that they have cost us already free of charge. And that is for 1.9 million households.

Also there will be administrators that will be chasing for the outstanding money from those who did not pay, this debt is not just gone.

Bulb are an energy supplier, not an energy producer. Nationalising the suppliers wouldn't help us in any real way. Much more unlikely that producers go bankrupt and they would probably find a lot of private investors who would "save" them if they did.

pochase

The OP is clearly talking about picking up the failed suppliers, not about the producers.

Why would a producer fail when a supplier is not paid?

[Deleted User]

And given that someone like Saudi Aramco is worth more than 2/3 of the UK GDP, why would they care about our tiny little piece of their profit?  Plenty of other places they can sell to.

Steveglw

[Deleted User] said:

There are plenty of ill-informed (or deliberately obtuse) utopian thinkers around, who seem to think that we could just nationalise everything and all our problems would just go away.  In their minds, a nationalised energy company could somehow get free fuel from the oil companies (which aren't British), wouldn't need to pay anything to the generators or transmission companies (which aren't British), and everything would be rosy.

The suppliers aren't making much money at the moment anyway, but because they're the name on the bill then everyone focuses in the wrong place.

Thanks for the explanation, who are the main electricity generation companies and how many are British owned? 

[Deleted User]

All the nuclear are EdF (France).

The large fossil stations were split between Uniper (Germany), SSE (Switzerland), Scottish Power (Spain) and Drax (independent UK), but a lot of them have closed recently so I think there's no Scottish Power conventional generation left.  There are a couple of smaller stations that are also independent, but they don't add up to much of the total.

Biggest players in renewables are Scottish Power, SSE, E.ON (Germany), Orsted (Denmark), Vattenfall (Sweden) and financial investments from pension funds, banks, etc.

Someone else might be able to jump in with anything I missed.