If I'm remembering correctly, it's because the previous government set the price floor to the average natural gas price, artificially propping up their north sea oil & gas industry that's been noncompetitive for decades. Even though they can make cheap energy, consumers get screwed because of national security concerns.
Unfortunately I don't have a source, and would appreciate a UK national with better understanding than me to chime in :)
Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in doing this.
If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.
Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.
The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:
- Shutdown of several nuclear plants without any replacement
- Shutdown of coal plants and replacement with gas
- The Ukraine war affecting gas prices
- Clean energy surcharges on bills (which hit electricity bills a lot harder than gas bills, regardless of how clean the electricity is...)
There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.
>Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period
Indeed. This is inherent failing of the use of auctions for setting price. While using auctions is a laudable goal, in reality it is not very efficient and easily gamed. Having a central purchaser model is not idea from a ideological standpoint but clearly more efficient allowing correctly controlling for more variables than can (crudely) be transmitted through a 30 minute auction period.
The only reason the wind farms got built was because they got guaranteed a high price of electricity that took the risk out of it. This changed more recently which is why building stopped.
Another factor is in the UK everything below the average tide line is owned by the Crown (as in the King not the government) who were very happy to get lease income. The Govt was also happy so it didn't look like the people were funding the King (which they are).
Also the public are very against wind turbines on land which is reasonable in England where there isn't much isolated land to put them.
At least they got built, which is more than can be said for the nuclear plants.
https://www.electricitybills.uk/ shows a breakdown of the components of consumer energy bills. It's not as simple as saying "it's expensive because of gas", though pricing based on the marginal production cost is one component.
That has two causes, dependency on natural gas, which would be worse without renewables and taxes, which is unrelated to renewables and related to general policy goals of reducing energy demand.
Also even in a European context UK power prices aren’t as high as many of its peers.
While it’s a nice concept I agree it’s probably not the best fit for the use case. I also don’t understand the point of recruitment spam. What’s the purpose of sending 5 follow up emails. I find it absolutely annoying and would never respond back to an unsolicited email. Surely had they enough applicants for an appealing job, they wouldn’t have chased that much.
To begin with, the average recruiter was hired in the last three months and will last three more months before looking for a new job. They have been equipped with a series of templates and told to customize them.
The goal of the recruiter is to make money by acquiring a candidate, presenting them to a company, and having the company hire them. Note that the recruiter does not actually work for the hiring company -- they have no relationship with them whatsoever, yet. The recruiter's company is paying a minimal salary with an additional fee based on the salary of the candidates who get hired through this process. A particularly scummy recruiting company pays no salary at all, and considers the recruiters to be independent contractors. The recruiter's company has someone in the back office who is manually or automatically scraping Indeed, Dice, Monster, whatever in order to get job listings.
At this point you can see that a recruiter is a speculative spammer.
> What’s the purpose of sending 5 follow up emails
because people often respond (positively) on the 4th - 5th sales email you send, even if they ignored the first, and anyone who's truly pissed off will have just marked it as spam already or blocked you.
I understand it would be better if that wasn't true, but it is true, and that's why people send automated follow-ups.
That map look like one extremely nationalist view from Armenians. There were a billion other civilization/dynasty/kingdom that controlled the region what is so called as “Greater Armenia”.
I moved to UK from Europe and I wouldn’t really say NHS is convenient. It is universal healthcare and you are not facing a bankruptcy most of the time in case of a health condition. Preventative and diagnosis treatments are so slow. In case I need to see a GP, i must try reaching them at 8ish in the morning otherwise they will simply ignore you and tell, call tomorrow.
I believe they release slots every morning. So it’s not possible to book for the next day. They always tell me call the next morning when I call around 9:30
so if the screw up is real then how come it's fake news? Clearly the culture isn't ideal yet if you just check resources I mentioned. It was more like a modern slavery when you consider previous state.
I can’t speak for other fields but tech scene in Germany and EU is a joke and there is no way one’s compensation matches US. I had a job offer in Munich and considering how low the quality of housing is you end up still paying more than €1300 for a 1 bed flat. (This was my market search back in 2018)
What the fuck, were you searching at Marienplatz in the city center? I mean, I'm a born and raised Munich dude, 1300€ for a 1BR sounds like someone attempted to rip you off - or you were on the hunt for a fully furnished apartment which is ... a questionable decision in itself.
