I remember last winter seeing 30 Days of Night, the gore-romp about Nietzsche-quoting vampires showing up in a small Alaskan town in dead of winter to suck the inhabitants dry. As winter approaches this year, I get a sense of similar doom as energy prices here soar far beyond the reasonable and people like Mark Owen-Lloyd, executive director of E.On, cheer the fact that the coldest part of the year will see more people choosing between food and heat and “It will make more money for us.”
You know, it’s those “let them eat cake” sort of comments that used to get a rich person decapitated by an angry mob, and you get to wonder exactly when the revolutionary enthusiasm finally petered out of the masses.
The quip was made at an Ofgem hosted event. Now, according to its own website, Ofgem is all about “protecting consumers.” This is done by “promoting competition, wherever appropriate, and regulating the monopoly companies which run the gas and electricity networks.” Apparently its watchdogs failed to notice the league of robber barons in attendance, salivating over the thought of coming up with new fake reasons to arbitrarily raise energy prices.
People in UK may not have followed the Enron scandal very much. A couple of years back it was this huge company driving up prices for energy it didn’t really have to sell anyway. Listening to energy companies here collude to raise the costs of heating bills by 40 percent or more shows that the only thing the Enron scandal showed other companies was how to do it. It’s like how zombies and vampires create more. Before Enron died it seems to have infected a half dozen or so little mini-Enrons, though these ones are called British Gas, E.ON Energy, EDF Energy, npower, Scottish and Southern Energy, and ScottishPower.
The new fakery behind heat bill increase comes at least in part from the increase in the cost of oil. Now, I odn’t know why oil should be going up as fast as it is. A lot of companies like to blame the Middle East, but it was the U.S. invasion that started the price increases so let’s not cast too many stones that way. But forget about that. Oil and gas are linked now because historically big factories used to heat their facilities using both oil and gas. No, that didn’t make any sense for basing the price of one on the other then either, but it’s the reason we hear repeated everywhere now, and it makes even less sense these days.
This leads me to think just how bad an idea it is to actually link all these disparate economic systems together. Electricity, gas and oil are not really linked commodities. The only relation they have is that some executives make a deal to steadily increase the price of one to push up profits on the other. This surely is capitalism, but it’s hardly “competition.”
So this sort of regulation, not really working. You can’t really encourage competition among entities much bigger than you are.
Instead of Ofgem, this winter rely on Energy Watch. We’ve contacted them a couple of times to sort out bad billing from and you’d be surprised how fast issues can be resolved when they call instead of you.
Tags: cost of living, energyBrowse Timeline
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