Why has the energy price guarantee favoured electricity over gas?

ElwoodBlues

When ofgem announced the October price cap last month of £3500, the unit rates were supposed to equate to a 100% increase in gas costs (14.8p vs 7.37p), and 85% increase in electricity costs (52p vs 28p). Yet the government intervention has limited the increase to 20% for electricity but gas is going up 40%.

Why has their price limit favoured electricity over gas?

Also noticed that the 'average' household price that they work off is based on electricity consumption of just 8 kWh per day. I'm pretty careful with my electric usage and it's been averaging about 10-11kWh a day over the last 5 years. I expect a lot of households are using way above 8kWh electric, and are going to be in for a large shock when it transpires that their actual bills come in way over the 2500 'average' price. 

Ultrasonic

The nature of any average or typical value is that some will use more and others less. As you've rightly concluded, what matters to you is your own usage.

I don't have a good answer to your first question though.

[Deleted User]

For the second part - they use the median, so half of households will use more than 2900kWh electricity according to their data.

For the first part - they picked a number randomly with no actual reasoning.

matelodave

Because the green levies were heavily weighted towards leccy rather than gas, so the suspension of green levies has had a bigger effect on leccy than it does on gas.

Not only that the wholesale cost of gas has risen more than the wholesale cost of leccy, probably because a proportion of leccy costs isn't directly attributed to the cost of gas due to the effect of generation from renewables and nuclear etc.

just had a trawl of t'interweb and these appeared to be the figures in January this year

 - The levy is 0.46p for every kWh of gas and 0.78p for electricity generated by fossil fuels, and raises £2 billion annually.

Its not ever so easy to find out what the exact figures are as most it gets rolled up into "average energy costs" and adds it all together.
However I did see that there appears to a be policy to increase the levy on gas to close the gap between it and leccy over time which I guess is on hold at the moment

[Deleted User]

matelodave said:

Because the green levies were heavily weighted towards leccy rather than gas, so the suspension of green levies has had a bigger effect on leccy than it does on gas.

Not only that the wholesale cost of gas has risen more than the wholesale cost of leccy, probably because a proportion of leccy costs isn't directly attributed to the cost of gas due to the effect of generation from renewables and nuclear etc.

just had a trawl of t'interweb and these appeared to be the figures in January this year

 - The levy is 0.46p for every kWh of gas and 0.78p for electricity generated by fossil fuels, and raises £2 billion annually.

Its not ever so easy to find out what the exact figures are as most it gets rolled up into "average energy costs" and adds it all together.
However I did see that there appears to a be policy to increase the levy on gas to close the gap between it and leccy over time which I guess is on hold at the moment

It's dead easy to find each cost, with several data points each year since about 2016 at least.  There's a big spreadsheet of them which explains exactly how they are calculated in each region.

The 'Green Levy' is actually about six different things, a lot of it is in the standing charge, and of which at least one component is zero (and has been for more than a year) and another is occasionally negative.

One part is even the ~£450million due to be paid by wind farms that have made too much profit this quarter.

Zaul22

Cos gas is what Putin turned off and the most expensive. 

Chrysalis

Gas is more seasonal in its usage and I think the hardest hit supply costs.

There is also electric only users.

It seemed logical to me.

wrf12345

The ratio of gas to electric cost is now roughly in line with the COP on air source heat pumps, so running costs are the same - next step, installation costs for heat pumps will have to come down radically, preferably via UK based factories churning them out. 

Qyburn

Subsidies on gas benefit around 80% of households, whereas electricity must be near to 100%

Section62

ElwoodBlues said:

Why has their price limit favoured electricity over gas?

The government want to phase out the use of gas for domestic heating and cooking.

They have signalled that the price of gas needs to increase relative to electricity to help achieve this aim.

Subsidising the price of gas equally to the electricity price subsidy would be irrational, given their stated aims.

Next stage... parity in the cost per kWh of gas and electricity.