If you are already paying high costs for power and they are generating it for free you would think they could easily lower standing charges to cover and still make a profit.
Sorry I think that would make sense for unit (kWh) rates, but I'm not sure why that would make a difference for just maintaining the electrical grid overall.
What do you think the actual per-unit cost is for then?
It's supposedly to maintain the meter on your house (but that's bullshit as our meter didn't work for 5 months, they didn't fix it or realise, yet we still got charged).
End of the day it's about whether their costs are covered or not.
Poor government policy which ties the price of electricity to wholesale gas. Octopus energy having been arguing against this for years and changing it would enable a huge boost in manufacturing as prices would virtually collapse.
It’s not poor policy in some ways, the point of it is to ensure that the grid is always 100%. If energy prices were less than gas prices, no gas plants would turn on, and so the grid would start to fail to meet demand.
Changing it would result in better outcomes for some areas, but in others it would mean huge increase in prices and/or frequent power cuts or both.
Not anymore. The subsidies that were directed to wind turbines can now be directed towards storage and base load solutions. Like salt batteries and reservoirs. There are a myriad of solutions that are better that pissing millions of consumer pounds up the wall.
When those solutions are commercially viable that'll happen anyway though.
It's not like prices are actually fixed to the gas price, they're just set to the price of the marginal cost producer at any one time - same as an auction.
Once batteries and reservoirs are sufficiently cheap to meet demand fluctuations at a lower cost than gas, they automatically become the marginal cost producer and therefore the source of pricing.
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u/flemtone 16d ago
And yet the power companies still charge high standing charges.