Yup, up go the gas prices..

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So the hazardous icy weather is nearly through here after a week where the temperature didn’t go above freezing in the United Kingdom. Tonight we have a front from the south bringing sleet and rain that will begin the rapid thaw process and so floods and slush next. But today is the day to enjoy the snow as we won’t see any more until next year as spring arrives. It’s grey and misty but if the kids are happy then we should all be happy. As expected the energy companies exploited the bad weather and are now threatening to increase our energy bills next month by 10%. On Thursday the country ran out of gas and they had to buy it in from Norway at four times the price and some industry had to scale back gas use. British Gas and the like will try to pass on that cost. They tell us they buy wholesale gas two years ahead in the summer at is cheapest but never cut our bills when the wholesale price is cheap (and I mean being given away free by the main oil companies to offload it) but always crank it up on the bill when the wholesale price rises. The average British family pay £1200 a year on gas and electricity as we have six cold months per year. Essentially, the energy base was privatised in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher, and the shareholders came first, seeing the companies get rid of vital gas storage space that covered extremes like this week. Storing gas is a cost to the company’s bottom line and so they simply decided to buy in gas at peak times from places like Qatar and Norway, 40% of our supply as the North Sea capacity runs dry. Global warming has given them the excuse to do that. The latest push by the other main utility, water, is to get everyone to have a water meter in their homes; they say to help reduce use in the summer. But this is England and it rains a lot and so suspicions are high in a country that never has too little water is they are trying to commoditize H20 by selling it by the measured unit. Once they do that they can start getting rid of storage reservoirs and suddenly it’s a limited commodity. I may be paranoid but that’s how I see it. There is plenty of gas and water out there but you have to store it when it’s cheap.