Have the government introduced any energy-saving/rationing measures like shorter work week/days? For example, here all businesses have to close by 8 PM (most don’t).
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Bwahahahahahaha. The government wants the great unwashed to spend more time at work, not less.
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Them Germans at it again,helping people.
Any thoughts from our German members.
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Well it’s preferable to a kick in the nuts.
Much of this is short term help to stop people from going under - which is necessary and welcome. However, the long term plan must be to move the country away from relying on volatile nations for essential supplies. With the Green party being a major part of the current government I was hoping to see more funding for energy efficiency measures and sustainable energy production (that currently accounts for around half of electricity production in Germany but could be far higher).
Effective government works by planning for these kind of external shocks in advance. That’s actually the hard sell because often it means things will be more expensive in the near future. We’ll see what they come up with over the next couple of years.
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There are some decent measures in that, but the devil is really in the details. Even the funding has a lot of question marks and its success depends to a large degree on decisions on the European level, since everything is connected in the energy market. This is the third ‘help package’, I don’t think it will be the last.
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It is a tough situation, because people need to get serious about energy efficiency, and therefore the price signal has to be there and strong. But left unfettered, the price shock will have huge distortionary effects and disproportionate adjustment costs. Necessarily, I think most of the policy mix has to be short term. The price signal itself should be setting some of the long term realignment on its way
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The problem with relying totally on price is that it hits those in poverty traps hardest. Government backed efficiency schemes are very effective because it can improve the situation of the poorest immensely but every improvement of energy use helps the entire economy. Well, except for power companies but sod them.
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Poverty traps, and also time frames. Even for people who can afford it, it is just not realistic to assume investments in distributed energy systems and energy efficiency happen overnight. The long term problem is that Britain’s fuel mix is far too reliant on natural gas. The immediate problem is that Russia is deliberately disrupting the power market. For that second problem, the price signal is in fact the problem. It represents a manipulated scarcity, not a real world one.
Power companies can actually do quite well from energy efficiency programs - in a system with marginal cost based pricing, the less they actually have to buy/generate at that highest cost, the better. If they have to fill 1% of demand from the highest marginal cost asset in the stack order, up to 99% of their output is getting that revenue against a lower cost. If they have to fill 40% of demand with that high cost asset, their profit is significantly lower.
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Yes, I was thinking more about the producers rather than the middlemen.
I might be misinterpreting this, but they estimated that it would cost 220m EUR to implement. I wonder what the equivalent cost here would be…
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Difficult to say but I found this:
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/6565/documents/71150/default/
The total expenditure of the rail system in 2019–20 was £17.4 billion,
made up of £9.5 billion spent on operating rail passenger services, £7.1 billion spent on
operating infrastructure and £0.9 billion spent on operating freight services and High
Speed 1 (figures do not sum due to rounding). In 2019–20, total rail sector income was
£17.1 billion, of which £5.1 billion was government funding. The remaining £12.0 billion
was earned income, the majority (80%) of which was earned through passenger fares.
That would indicate passenger fares were £9.6 billion but the Spanish scheme would only cover short distance fares (so presumably the likes of Merseyrail but not GNER). I did find that regulated fares (season tickets and the like) account for 40% of fares so that would be around 5 billion. British railways are peculiarly expensive to run for reasons that no one has ever quite determined.
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all the leaves on the rails, apparently.
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Mentions ‘households’ only. So I guess businesses need to just tread water for 6 months, a year, 2 years, 4 years?
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Is the standing charge to be locked as well?
This is a welcome intervention but does this also need to be back dated? I know some have had scary estimates already but don’t know if that has kicked in yet.
A little worried that it took this long for government to understand the issue.
Isn’t part of this deal with the energy companies an agreement that bills will remain at their current level for next 20 - 30 years?
I think there is a plan for businesses too, probably the same one. Seems to be multiple versions being trialled in the media.
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Quite possible. The details havent been confirmed yet.
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