Cap energy companies !?

[WorkHardPlayHard1]

Why doesn't our government cap the energy companies' prices?

Can someone explain why the energy company's are reporting record profits, basically charging what they like?

Meanwhile old, sick and other hardworking people are having prices up to x5 usual cost and can't afford it?

And now government subsidising prices to the tune of billions??

May be overly simplistic but why not cut the costs at source??

Because the companies aren’t making record profits, not in the context you assume anyway.
The likes of British Gas are simply selling us the energy, British Gas are a retailer. they buy it in from the producers, (BP for example ) it is the producers that are making profits.

The producers prices are set globally and because it’s global they cannot be regulated by us here in the UK, they can charge what they like and there’s not much we can do about it.

British gas have made a profit, but not a massive one, and that’s simply because they’ve inherited a lot of customers from the companies that went bust last year.
Someone else I’m sure can explain it better than me

This question has cropped up time and time again on here. "Energy companies" are made up of producers and suppliers.

The people making the money are energy producers. They are international companies so capping their prices is next to impossible, because they are not under UK jurisdiction. They do not sell to us, they sell to suppliers.

The energy suppliers buy that energy at high prices and resell it to us - ideally with a small (5%) markup. However, they have been selling to us at a loss because energy proces ARE capped. They are not making massive profits.

I think also the global price is set in $, and the £ is very weak at the moment further making it more expensive

it was a good explanation for people who still don't understand there are energy wholesalers & energy retailers & we can't regulate global companies.

the ones that are BOTH, could make it cheaper but unsurprisingly the wholesale division don't see why they should if they others aren't & that all screws up the energy market too

Windfall Tax I'm still on the fence about.

We don't want to be paying high prices for energy for decades to come to repay this 'Government Handout/ 'price cap' but if we take more in Windfall tax, it'll make the U.K. a less attractive place for investment & that's not good when we need growth.

we really need to grow our way out of this mess, NOT get it back from consumers in energy bills.

Energy suppliers don’t make any money from customers they have inherited - they had to supply them at super high wholesale prices and as they weren’t expecting to have those customers, they hadn’t hedged their volumes in advance (ie fixed). Hence why the government plugged the gap and paid the suppliers through the ‘Supplier of Last resort’ mechanism. Those costs are then passed through to everybody, hence why standing charges increased.

As PPs have said, it’s producers who are making the money, but even then, many producers/generators hedge their production, i.e fix the sales prices they get in advance, so they won’t be making lots of money either in some cases, sometimes the banks do too as they provide the forward financial instruments.

It’s hard to regulate, because the profit sits all over the place, across different industries.