Energy Price Cap to hit nearly £7000, what is the chance they will hit £10k by end of 2023?

[onthefencesitter]

I think it's extremely likely esp if Putin cuts off Nord Stream. Thoughts?

Nationalising the energy industry is the only long term solution.

Energy companies should be run for the benefit of our country, our people and our economy.

The telegraphs energy bill calculator made me spit out my tea. Utterly ridiculous. From £130 to £436 by April next year. 🤮

@Discovereads Oh god that's a bit grim. We've not long moved from a 2 bed flat, that was electric only.
To a 3 bedroom house. When we moved in at December we was moaning then about Gas.
I can't imagine what it'll be like this December . Scary

I really feel for you. We were evicted and just moved to this home in July and so have no idea what our energy usage or costs might be. We were told the burner thing in the living room was a wood burner (it said wood burner on the property description too), but turns out it’s a gas run fake wood burner! Be cheaper to just get a fire pit and throw £5 notes in it than run that! So there went our idea for back up heat. Right now I am hoping for all us that we have a very mild winter. I’m all for some global warming for Christmas.

I don't know where OP's fear of £10,000 for the end of 2023. Certainly no responsible people have forecast that. I have no idea what the prices will actually be, but I think £10k is highly unlikely.

Having said that, I can't work out what is going on at Cornwall Insights, who have usually been fairly good with their predictions.

On Monday 22/08 they released these predictions:
Q4 2022 £3,553.75 (ie October 2022 - announced today as £3549)
Q1 2023 £4,649.72
Q2 2023 £5,341.08
Q3 2023 £4,767.97
Q4 2023 £4,807.11
These predictions were in line with many other expert forecasts.

Now, on Friday 26/08 they released these predictions:
Q1 2023 £5,386.71
Q2 2023 £6,616.37
Q3 2023 £5,897.12
Q4 2023 £5,887.31
They have given no reason as to what has changed in the last 4 days to cause these higher forecasts eg. Q2 2023 is 23.9% higher than they predicted at the start of the week!

Well done, captain obvious.

Have you worked out how people can learn to see in the dark with the shorter days, dry washing etc winter weather or without heating?

FFS.

UK electric will be 61 cents in October.
So unless other countries have massive price hikes we will have the most expensive gas on the planet.

I'd be interested to see a correlation graph of hedge funds against fuel prices.

FFS most expensive electricity not gas (although that would not surprise me)

It's not about stocking up on thermal underwear I'm afraid. Many people just can't afford to heat their houses at all, can't afford to run their fridges, can't afford to cook. It really has gone beyond thermal underwear for so many people.

If it's any comfort though, Cornwall Insights who have been pretty accurate at predicting the price cap so far, are predicting that it will start dropping towards the end of 2023....

I'm seriosly thinking of asking to be disconnected and just spend a lot of time sitting in indoor shopping arcade and in the library on coldest days. It would be cheaper to eat out every day than pay to drive supermarket, buy, refrigerate/freeze and cook food. Swimming pool for a swim and shower twice a week too.

Not one government minister has been available for interview today, it's disgusting. Martin Lewis has been doing their job for them.

I've got a wind up radio for entertainment and a log burner to heat water for tea. I'm lucky I think I could actually survive totally off grid if I had to.

Should a solution be negotiated with Putin? How long is this going to go on for?

If Ukraine and Russia do not find a way out of this war, many British people will lose their lives, homes and more.

Even if the government gave us all money to cushion the blow, we or our children will be paying it back for years to come. Handouts are not a medium or long term solution.

It’s all a mess. The war needs to stop. The suffering is not just in Ukraine but previously prosperous European countries are being brought to their knees. Our economies are being razed to the ground.

The wholesalers are still making huge profits.

I saw someone on a thread say that we're supposed to hang the washing out when it's dry in winter. Clearly they have never lived on the Pennines.

Swimming pools will be among the first casualties. There are already chlorine shortages, prices for that have gone up, heating those massive spaces as well as the water are going to cost an absolute fortune.

I work as a community nurse in a deprived area. I saw a man earlier today who uses a nebuliser four times a day, ventilation machine over night for 8 hours, the bed he sleeps in has an airflow mattress that has to plugged in 24/7, he had 3 fans on because of the heat and his breathing. He was telling me how scared he is because there is nothing apart from the fans he can turn off.

To be fair, you will be cold outside even in thermals if you aren't moving. I can run in shorts pretty much all year round and be fine but I'm bitterly cold inside if I'm not moving and layered up. I need warm air to breathe in.

Fracking really isn't a solution for the UK. There is a reason that there is a moritorium in the UK and across much of the Europe. We are too densely populated to support it safely (as Zac Goldsmith pointed out "The UK isn't Utah"). It also requires massive amounts of water (a bit of an issue for the UK for anyone who hasn't noticed). Then there's question of how long it would take to scale up (years not months) and considerable uncertainty about how much energy it would actually yield (there have been disappointingly low yields where it has been tried). Then you have the perfectly reasonable local opposition wherever it's proposed. There are much more scalable domestic energy sources available (coal? North Sea oil?). And perhaps stop supplying electricity to France, as we are curently doing (although we now have no large scale energy storage facilities in the UK. Thank you Tory government).

Just done the calculator for us and it's grim.
I'm a carer for my disabled son and my husband is on a really low wage working for himself.
I honestly don't know what we are going to do.

People keep saying that. But how galling will it be to still be paying a fortune for something you can barely use?

Boris would disagree with you:

Boris Johnson has said households across Europe have to endure the cost-of-living crisis to counter Russian aggression during a visit to Ukraine.

www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-62663247.amp

The point is that that there with these energy prices there will also be excess deaths in theUK as well from people living in damp cold conditions, the return of Covid and flu season plus higher particulate air pollution as more people have to burn logs and coal.

Honestly it's a respiratory death time bomb about to go off. So unless there is an agreement reached with Russia then it won't just be Ukrainians paying for this war with their lives.

You're assuming all those places will stay open - businesses don't even have the comparative luxury of the price cap, so will probably struggle even more than individual households....I can see most places significantly limiting their opening hours, that or staying open but not putting the heating on, like schools and offices had to during covid. In which case, because they are open spaces, they will be a lot colder than the average room in a house.

£7k might as well be £70k for many people. The numbers are becoming irrelevant now. It’s just so that the Kinghts in shining armour can come and tell Joe Public that they have been saved.

The more they scare us, the more we’ll thank them for keeping us safe… sorry that was last year. I mean warm.

The knights in shining armour being the elite?
Even those in big mansions may have a shock at their bills at some point.

The way it is going, even those that can comfortably pay private school fees now, will be feeling some pressure.