The UK government is being pressed to wipe billions from the energy costs facing households and heavy industry by reforming the high taxes levied on electricity bills.
These policy levies mean the UK pays some of the highest energy bills in the world, and are simultaneously disadvantaging British industry and stifling the efforts of households to transition to lower-carbon heating systems, according to industry trade groups.
Make UK has warned that the government’s long-awaited industrial policy is at risk of being derailed by the high energy prices charged to UK manufacturers, which the lobby group states make the sector’s energy bills 46% higher than the global average.
No doubt Ed’s response is going to be that no, really, renewables are cheraper. See?
They won’t remove the stupid subsidies as that’d annoy Vince and impact Labour party donations.
Probably charge large households more to offset costs for others. Base it on the council tax valuations (after updating them to fuck the slightly well off even more).
I’ve read somewhere that 25% of household electricity bills are Net Zero taxes. Don’t know whether that’s correct/true.
Take a look at the first chart – https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/all-available-charts?keyword=breakdown%20of%20electricity%20bill&fuel_type=1606&sort=relevance
It’s 25.48% of the bill for Environmental and social obligation costs. It’s not just Net Zero but writing off the bills of the feckless.
Electricity that’s ‘cheap’ at the top of a pole sticking out of the North Sea is no use to me.
Add on the VAT and it’s 30% higher than it would otherwise be. It’s only going to go up with Mad Milliband in charge.
“It’s 25.48% of the bill for Environmental and social obligation costs. It’s not just Net Zero but writing off the bills of the feckless.”
It’s money taken from normal consumers and given to poor folks. It’s redistribution, it’s not optional, but it doesn’t appear on the total of government taxes. It IS a tax, but it isn’t. It’s a cheat. These figures ahould be taken into account when we total the tax share of GDP.
Meant to say, one option they are looking at is to move the “Environmental and social obligation costs” from electricity (yay) to gas (boo).
So, it won’t go away, just slight of hand as to where it’s stolen from. Not sure if they’ll bother to add it to heating oil as well – if not, I might benefit.
How quickly could we reopen a few coal mines and build some power stations, anybody know?
I’m guessing steam turbines are long lead time items, but the rest should be a lot quicker than building new atomic plant?
Vote for Steve and we’ll put the new coal-fired power plants in North London and Brighton. Because fuck them, that’s why.
“I’m guessing steam turbines are long lead time items, but the rest should be a lot quicker than building new atomic plant?”
The UK government decided in 1952 that they wanted a civilian nuclear power programme, started building Calder Hall in 1953, and it was connected to the grid in 1956.
So three years, with 1950s technology/engineering. It’s as fast as the government wants it to be.
@NiV
Problem is in those days virtually all electrical generation plants and ships used steam turbines
Not true now
Quickest way would be GT or disele generators but CCGT more efficient
NiV – The UK government decided in 1952 that they wanted a civilian nuclear power programme, started building Calder Hall in 1953, and it was connected to the grid in 1956.
It was a more heroic age, when even civil servants could be useful.
@starfish
I don’t know. It’s only a powerpoint bullet point, but I’ve seen 24 months build time stated for CCGT.
https://ukerc.rl.ac.uk/publications/presentation/SCI07112017-COMMS.pdf – slide 5.
Point is, it’s not the engineering/construction that takes the time, even for nuclear. It’s the planning enquiries and bureaucracy and price/subsidy negotiations that make it so slow. The government can build new capacity as fast as they want to. When it takes 6+ years just to fill in the paperwork to request planning permission, I deduce that it’s because they don’t really want to.
How quickly could we reopen a few coal mines
Since they’re mostly flooded, a long time! But it doesn’t matter, because imported coal is still much cheaper than deep-mined (which is why all the mines closed in the first place).
Milibrain wants to ‘equalise’ VAT on gas (currently 5%, claimed by the Greens as a ‘subsidy’) to persuade more of us to buy heat pumps.
Chris – Yes, but in the world today we could do with not being dependent on foreign imports to supply our energy needs.
It doesn’t look like the international situation is becoming more stable.
Isn’t pumping water out a fairly easy technical challenge? That use case is how we invented the industrial revolution in the first place. And wouldn’t subsidised domestic coal still cost a mere fraction of Net Zero?
NiV – It’s the planning enquiries and bureaucracy and price/subsidy negotiations that make it so slow. The government can build new capacity as fast as they want to. When it takes 6+ years just to fill in the paperwork to request planning permission, I deduce that it’s because they don’t really want to.
The positive from this is that it’ll be so fucking easy to rack up wins for the British people, once we rid ourselves of the cuckolds. Remember when we used to win things? They’ve done their best to make us forget.
We have a far easier path to national sanity than the United States does with its broken system of government. Parliamentary supremacy is the gift that Cromwell gave us.
I have a great belief in Britain, you know. We are not a nation of social workers, or clients of social workers. We are not, please God, a nation of deserving cases. We are a fierce, proud nation, and we are still, God willing, a nation to be reckoned with.
Reopening coal mines ain’t the way. Gas and oil is, with a rapid build-out of nuke. The nukes don’t have to be Hinckley C; why can’t submarine or ship nukes on nuke farms do in the interim?
@ Chris Miller
Orwell described “Newspeak” 77 years ago.
A heat pump is (according to its promoters) “up to” 400% efficient [more than 100% efficient is impossible in English but not in Newspeak] – except in cold weather when one might want some heating when the shysters claim a more modest 200% efficiency. The marginal power station is now OCGT with a 35-40% efficiency *before you take into account transmission losses of around 10%* so the joint efficiency of the additional heat pump and the generator of the electricity it uses is 63-72% compared to 88-94% for a gas boiler.
A 5% VAT rate is a subsidy in Newspeak
It increasingly amazes me that the UK managed to fight and win an entire world war inside 6 years, while nowadays building 140 miles of new railway takes about 20 years.
” We are not a nation of social workers, or clients of social workers. We are not, please God, a nation of deserving cases. We are a fierce, proud nation, and we are still, God willing, a nation to be reckoned with.”
Whatever you’re smoking, I want some.
@ Norman
Because that would be too easy: Rolls Royce has supplied nuclear power plants to submarines for decades. The Greenies (?Mekon) would have no excuse for demanding we go back to the Dark Ages.
As far as I know in Oz, we’ve only blown up one coal burning power station in South Australia.
We export coal all over the world. So you’d think it’d be simple to simply keep the coal burners burning indefinitely. Wouldn’t you??
It wouldn’t take long at all to build new stations.
Or anything else we need.
The problem is the government and bureaucracy getting in the way.
Wait until the shooting starts and the government feels it’s position is under threat.
Power plants, steel mills, coal mines, everywhere
In 2009 the UAE signed an agreement with South Korea’s KEPCO to build a nuclear plant with four reactors, with total capacity of 5.6GW (more or less the same as the UK has today). The first reactor started commercial operation in 2021 and the fourth and final one last September.
15 years, start to finish. Total cost reported to be $32 billion.
@john77 – “more than 100% efficient is impossible”
No. It’s not. 100% efficient in the context of heating is a heater where it heats by emitting 100% of the electricity consumed into the space to be heated. Over 100% is possible using a heat pump which can transport heat from elsewhere using electricity (just as your fridge transports heat out of it), and it may transport more heat that would be directly generated by merely dissipating the energy in the electricity.
That’s not efficiency, it’s Coefficient of Performance (often loosely referred to as ‘efficiency’ by the ignorant, and salespeople).
@Chris Miller – “That’s not efficiency”
That’s a perfectly reasonable way to express it in plain English. Just because it is not the technical term does not make it wrong.
Charles, do you mind taking your supercilious humanities pomp elsewhere? You owe your quality of life to engineers. No-one else.
@ Charles
NO: in plain English, which you choose not to write, efficiency is doing the task as well as it can be done. “Newspeak” is not welcome here. 101% efficiency is nonsensensical.