Why is electricity so bloody expensive in the UK?

[Coshofliving]

You can economise as much as you wish wrt gas heating costs but we're dark a lot of the year so we need lighting plus firing up our gas at all means we use electricity. And it costs bloody loads of money compared to other similar northern latitude countries. Why is that?

https://www.electricradiatorsdirect.co.uk/news/how-does-the-uk-compare-with-europe-when-it-comes-to-rising-energy-bills/#:~:text=The%20UK%20has%20the%20fourth,around%2026.67%20%C2%A3p%2FkWh.

Electricity in Germany, Denmark, and Italy is more expensive, than the UK.

Taxation on the end customer, predatory private sector ownership together with decades of lack of investment, a very owner friendly ofgen, overloading paperwork for new infrastucture and crazy subsidies to push renewables.

Boris announced we would be building mini nuclear reactors in 2020 which would really help, four big reactor builds are also pending. Nothing has moved forward at all so far, all stuck on paperwork for the environment agency....

I believe that Germany and Denmark pay more than UK and Sweden is 5th.

Also, it isn’t true to say that the UK is dark for a lot of the year. You need to be a lot further north for that… eg, northern Norway.

The UK is dark, for sure. Glasgow is the same latitude as Moscow, seven hours a day light in winter. @TheNoonBell interesting, I thought it must be a combination of factors, but surely the UK government should take steps against this seeing as how we're dark here?

Also, Germany and Denmark have higher wages. What they're spending on electric isn't as much as a hit for them. Italy .. well, I love Italy but it's utterly bent, state and big corp wise, ofc things are expensive in a country where everyone takes a bung.

Is it? We aren’t in the uk. Central Europe, and we pay around €750 a year in standing charges alone. So without using any Electric at all it’s €60 a month standing charges

We also have high heating costs ontop as far colder that uk (its already snowing here) - we pay €275 a month for heating/ hot water

Tories in the 80's said competition would be good for the consumer .

Yeah LOL "ask Sid". Bastards "forgot" to future proof while selling us down the river. Look at who owns these companies.

52.75 I pay every day in standing charges just for electric.

What the fuck happened to my bloody north sea oil? We should be self sufficient by now, not getting fleeced by french conglomerates.

We import most of it, and closed down almost all our storage facilities. So we can't buy cheap and store it.

What, you pay 52.75 EVERY DAY in standing charges. Do you mean every month?

Boris announced we would be building mini nuclear reactors in 2020 which would really help, four big reactor builds are also pending. Nothing has moved forward at all so far, all stuck on paperwork for the environment agency....

How long do you think it takes to build a nuclear reactor, including all of the planning stages, etc? Absolutely years.

Nuclear should not be the answer, for obvious reasons I hope.

No, every day, as I said. That's what I pay every day before I use anything.

52 pence a day is about right.
£15 a month.

oops, my mistake, you meant 52 pence, I thought you meant 52 pounds.

Sounds very reasonable to me. I'm in Canada, our standing charges are very high. If I want to depress myself I'll go look them up and post them here.

Lol no, 52p, not £52. Our living wage is just £10.45 here, we'd be run into the ground with a £52 a day standing charge! Do you have your own oil source over there in Canada? We do here in the UK, in the North sea, but you'd never know it looking at our gas and electric charges. We pissed the profits from it up the wall on lowering interest rates to borrow against buying assets like houses and now it's all owned by EU conglomerates and they're charging us loads for energy. Sad times.

We are dark in the winter, yes, but in the summer it's the opposite. Glasgow gets 17 hours of daylight in mid-June. I agree that it does feel much worse when we're in these darker days, though. We take our summer light so for granted.

It's not that it feels bad, more that it costs us shitloads.

I used to live in Russia and nobody worried about putting their lights on or heating on because it's a cold dark country, like the UK, Northern hemisphere, and even though Russia is an absolute basket case country they know that in a cold dark place you need to have cheap heat and light. It's basic. But here in the UK the attitude seems to be all about braving it out and taking pride in being cold and paying shit loads of money for energy even though we literally have an oilfield off our coast. It's crackers.

Canada is a very big place. It is self-sufficient in energy, and is a major exporter of crude oil to the US.

Most of the oil comes from Alberta, where you can literally get oil out of the ground easily... they're called "tar sands". Unfortunately, separating tar from sand is a lot of work. It's harder to get oil from oil wells, but easier to refine.

I live in Ontario; most of our oil comes by pipeline from Alberta, Same with natural gas.

In Ontario, about 60% of electricity comes from nuclear, though nationally most electricity is generated by hydroelectric plants. Hence the common use of the word "hydro" to mean electricity.

Putting the lights on costs very little compared with heating a home in winter. Energy saving light bulbs don't cost much to run.

If you want cheap utilities in a dark country you could move to Iceland. Cost of living is otherwise very expensive though.

But I know things are bad in the UK, but I'm sure there are far more downsides to the average person living in Russia right now.

Have you done everything you can to reduce your energy usage and hence cost or are you just wanting to moan?

Waves to CanadianJohn from the home of the “oil sands” in Alberta.

Ours is 100% hydroelectricity where I am. It’s all produced in the country. We still get charged loads. €60 a month standard if charge is approx €2 per day, so almost x4 uk. We then pay tax ontop of the standing charge and actual use. 20% I think. So around €12 ontop of standing charge is the tax for it. So that’s €72 a month without Turning it on.
50cm of snow fell locally yesterday, probably more has fallen overnight so you can’t not use heating either.

in Heating and electricity I think our bill is approx 1/3 of our mortgage per month

When have we ever storage facilities for electricity??

Is electricity particularly expensive in the UK?

I wfh and my ds has a huge pc with multiple fans that he runs constantly, yet I've spent £550 on electricity so far this year. So £55 a month or about £1.80 a day. That's for lights, cooking, washing & fridge/freezer, tv, comms & computing. Obviously I'd like it to be less but it seems fairly good value.

Don't get me started on the price of gas though!

Mine is 16p for e7
34 p for day rate