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UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

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Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#141

Post by AlexandrB »

break_the_bank wrote: post #128
Latty wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? That's why I was very specific about who should pay it. This is such a common response to any taxation. It is true that any solution done wrong can make things worse, but that's not a reason not to try and solve the problem, it's a reason to do it right. The alternative, not taxing anyone much, has been tried: it gets us here, with public services collapsing and the country becoming less and less desirable to ex…

Isn’t income over a certain number already taxed at 45%? How much higher are you proposing?

The US used to have rates of 70% or higher for the highest brackets[1]. There's plenty of headroom vs. historical norms.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#142

Post by M2Ys4U »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #99
phantomathkg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain why you think people is slacking, please?

I can’t say why. But work seems to have no “gravity”. Like in my brother’s government job, coming into office was a given. You could have serious career repercussions if you were slacking off. Then the lockdown happened and work moved online. Everyone was slacking off, including the managers. Now they’ve got in-office mandates again but some of the workers just don’t come in when they don’t fee like it and just log i…

Not going in to the office is not the same thing as slacking off.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#143

Post by trashtester »

missedthecue wrote: post #66
TrackerFF wrote: post #20

Hopefully the current energy crisis (in Europe) will further accelerate development in renewable energy. Seems much of Europe is still chained to LNG, and that demand is even wreaking havoc in countries which have been previously quite self-sustained, or really don't use LNG much themselves - with Norway being a good example.

The problem for europe is that solar panels, windfarms, and nuclear power plants don't produce natural gas. Electricity is great, but it's not a replacement for natural gas by itself. In Germany, only 25% of natgas usage is accounted for by electricity production.

Electricity, if the price is low enough, can fully replace almost every use case for natural gas. This will require some level of investment, of course, such as replacing gas ovens with electric ovens (or better, heat pumps) as well as replacing gas machinery with electric alternatives for most industries.

There MAY be a few cases where alternatives are harder to find (where you need the chemistry of the gas rather than the energy), but that is a pretty small percentage overall.

But to produce energy at prices that are competitive to typical prices for NG is pretty hard without either coal or cost efficient nuclear, at least in colder climates. Solar is perhaps close to becoming cheaper in sunny, dry areas further south, but wind power looks like a poor alternative at the scale needed, since it's so unreliable. Maybe one day batteries or other storage will be cheap enough that we can store wind power for a week or more, but for now, it looks like the only low-CO2 option is nuclear.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#144

Post by tialaramex »

evandijk70 wrote: post #73
jongjong wrote: post #44

I've been whining about how unjust and non-meritocratic the current economy has been for the last 5 years and look at that... These insane inflation numbers are proving me right. I'm quite sure the inflation will continue too. My detractors were in fact gaslighting me the whole time, as I suspected. The people at the top today are incompetent and lack principles. No better than the corrupt dictators of uncivilized na…

Why are these numbers proving you right? Those people that made an decision to transition to a sustainable lifestyle by: - Isolate their house and/or live in a small, well isolated apartment - Buy solar panels and a heatpump. - Save gas by wearing an extra sweater and setting the thermostat a bit lower. are affected far less by this massive inflation. Of course, for the 37% in the UK that do not own a house (probably…

The word you probably want is "insulate". A thermally insulated house (it's common to skip the word "thermally" but we can insulate for noise for example) will retain heat better and thus be less expensive for the same volume to heat during a cold winter.

If the house was isolated that might actually make heat loss worse, because it suggests other homes are quite distant. For example my sister's house is an "end terrace" so one wall of it won't lose much heat since the other side is somebody else's house and no doubt they also keep warm in the winter. In contrast my mother's house is perched up on a hill, I wouldn't quite describe it as "isolated" but certainly she's going to spend a lot of money heating it.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#145

Post by data_maan »

automatic6131 wrote: post #102
data_maan wrote: post #47

Three things: 1 Renewables: The solution exists already but no gov't (in particular the UK) is implementing it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy 2 The UK gov't rather is arresting people demonstrating for housing insulation. This is probably the dumbest thing a gov't can do, since insulation is a "bipartisan" issue and everybody would profit from it. 3 On top of this the UK is on the verge of p…

If you glue yourself to a road, you could be supporting an end to pedophilia, but I'll still cheer the coppers arresting you so I can go where I want.

Somehow this sounds to me like you would rather support pedophilia than see your precious right to "go where you want" restricted.

Standard hedonism of the typical climate change deniers here. Go on, people, nothing to see ...

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#146

Post by tankenmate »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #100
phantomathkg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain why you think people is slacking, please?

General attitude is obvious, people just don't care as much about their jobs as they used to. The WFH thing is an example - people have started to treat going to work as some sort of optional annoyance.

During the 1750s the average work day was 11 hours, 208 days a year (2288).

During the 1860s the average work day was 16 hours, 311 days a year (4976).

During the 1920s the average work day was 8 hours, 243 days a year (1944, and productivity was up according to Henry Ford).

Most tech employers in China pre COVID, 10 hours a day, 297 days a year (2970).

Netherlands pre COVID, 5.8 hours a day, 234 days a year (1357).

US pre COVID, 6.9 hours a day, 239 days a year (1649).

Which one of the above examples cared the most about their jobs? Which was the most productive? In terms of business profit PPP? And wage PPP?

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#147

Post by arcturus17 »

linuxftw wrote: post #101

Inflation isn't causing this. Inflation is devaluing of the currency. What's causing this is increased acquisition costs due to public policy. 6K seems reasonable for a family's annual energy bill. Frankly, it seems on the lower end for such a climate. What's really absurd in the UK is property prices. You'd be able to afford all the energy you desire if you weren't paying 10x what it should cost for housing.

On exactly what assumptions and calculations could you come to the conclusion that 6k GBP / year is reasonable energy spend for an average household in the UK?

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#148

Post by data_maan »

Latty wrote: post #61
azangru wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the government is doing nothing. What do you think the government should do?

Tax those who can afford it to help those that can't. At some point if the rich continue to demand sacrifice of the poor to prop up their gathering of wealth, it'll be guillotines in the streets. Historically Britain's upper class has been sensible at offering compromise to avoid extreme change, but it appears the current crop think their control of the media is enough to keep the population placid while they suffer.…

I think there are phase transitions happening in terms of how much the population can accept. And usually these occurs rather quickly, after a prolonged stalement. Let's see if the current upper class can read the signs before a critical threshold is reaches.

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#149

Post by bko »

minimaul wrote: post #86
bko wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: >The investment bank predicted that the country’s retail energy price cap — which limits how much households pay for heating and electricity — would be raised to £4,567 in January and then £5,816 in April, compared with the current level of £1,971 a year.... Nabarro said Citi’s new forecasts had taken account of a 25 per cent increase in wholesale gas prices last week and a 7 per cent rise in wholes…

This is well beyond ‘market prices will fix this’ - market prices will mean a very large chunk of the population will literally be unable to afford to cook dinner and heat their houses. We already don’t have AC in summers which are growing more and more extreme (regularly over 90F, and sometimes over 100F) - there’s nothing there to turn off. Edit: Big power retail companies in the UK are making record profits, and s…

> Edit: Big power retail companies in the UK are making record profits, and so is generation.

The largest gas provider in UK (British Gas) profits in millions of pounds:

2009 147

2010 226

2011 258

2012 291

2013 153

2014 96

2015 73

2016 43

2017 11

2018 8

2019 -5

2020 27

I couldn't find more recent data but please provide it if you have it. These are in millions of pounds. Suppose their profit jumped to 100 million pounds (4x the 2020 profits). Do you think 100 MILLION pounds would solve the problem? To put this in context, public sector fuel and energy expenditure in 2021 was 456 BILLION. And this is only public sector. Profits aren't even a rounding error.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/521474/centrica-energy-e...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298887/united-kingdom-uk...

Re: UK inflation forecast to hit 18.6% next year, energy bills may rise to £6000

#150

Post by blitzar »

simonswords82 wrote: post #107

I know it might seem obvious to some that the bill is annual but I wish BBC/FT et al would be clear that this is an annual figure

Its a catch 22 - people are too stupid to understand £0.50 per kWh up from £0.28 per kWh will be the new price cap so they do the really stupid average annual bill. However, it turns out people see the headline say £3,000 or whatever, and believe that is what their bill will actually be, irrespecitve of their usage.
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