24 January - Things can only get bitter
There
is a good handful of subjects on which one could write an essay on how
successive governments have managed to wreck the country such that nothing much
works. Transport, health services, devolution, the relationship with the
European Union, Local Government, postal deliveries, the police, the justice system, innumerable quangos and one
could argue that pretty much everything started to go wrong when Labour was
elected in 1997. They hammered the banks and pensions and sold the gold reserves at a knock down price.
Don’t even mention signing the Lisbon Treaty in secret which upset at least 52% of the population.
As if that was not enough Labour built fewer Council houses than Margaret
Thatcher, encouraged mass immigration, went a bit mad with John Major’s Private
Finance Initiative and they set in motion the plans for Net Stupid and all the Green taxes that entails.
Today everyone can see that energy policies have been insane for many years past. Who decided that wind
turbines made more sense than maintaining a nuclear industry and that dynamiting
coal powered power stations was such a brilliant idea?
It’s easy enough to blame Labour for initiating the mess that we are now in
but that is to ignore the fact that the Conservatives have been
running the show for more than twelve years and instead of changing direction they
dug the hole even deeper. Useful maybe for burying the people they are happily freezing in their homes but not a lot else.
Nothing illustrates the idiocy of current policies more than people being paid
to switch off their electrical appliances between 5 and 6 p.m. The National Grid did it
yesterday and is repeating the wheeze this evening and extending the time to
between 4:30 and 6 p.m. I have been offered £4 for every kilowatt hour of electricity I save.
Last year I opted in to the first test run of the system and earned myself 19 pence which was barely worth the effort but I did it
again on Round 2 too. That one was more profitable. I received the opt in confirmation
notice but a day or two later Octopus Energy’s phone App said I had not bothered to
register so I had earned nothing. I submitted the evidence that they were wrong and I was given £6 in compensation. Much better!
Since then I have earned nothing and don’t think I ever will.
The reason is that my evening peak electricity consumption has been pushed down to
almost nothing. About 10 watt hours for the critical hour yesterday and unless I
throw the main breaker switch it cannot go any lower. So only those who have
not yet reduced their consumption can benefit from the National Grid’s largesse
which I suppose is logical despite being superficially unfair to those who have already taken action to curb their usage.
The central screenshot is from a third party app which does not
reflect the correct tariff, The actual cost of the day’s electricity was 59 pence including the standing charge of 32 pence.
(The Octopus app provides the cost as a pop up which cannot be screen grabbed.)
The gas bill was unfortunately not in the same ball park.
As anyone interested in this subject will recognise. Most of my electricity consumption is at the off peak rate and
for the remainder of the day the house is running off a battery.
Note: The data provided and participation in the payback scheme requires a SMET2 Smart Meter.