From THE DAILY SKEPTIC
by Nick Rendell
“It’s amazing whether the dog can play the piano well or not, but he can play everything!” Dr. Johnson may have applied this aphorism to Rachel Reeves cancellation of fuel benefits for retirees. However, in this case the two were surprised that the allowance was canceled and which is handled so badly.
As a general rule I’m fine with anything that removes the state from people’s lives. However, the ‘optics’ of this announcement were shocking. Why not wrap it up with an initiative program, such as confirmation that the triple lock will be retained or together with details about the upcoming pension increase?
In any case, there’s a bigger mystery: why people sitting shivering at home in poorly insulated, poorly heated social housing pay around twice as much per kWh for off-peak electricity as EV owners, at a cost of £65,000 Tesla?
You should remember the biblical parable of the widow’s mite. In the temple one day a widow can only give a small charity donation. He gave me two coins and then slowly ran away. In the meantime, the rich people made huge donations, although the amount they could easily afford.
Well, in every parish in this country something like that happens. The widows in this case are mainly poor old women who live in post-War houses and houses with night heaters. Interestingly, there are around 1.4 million homes that still use night heaters. The rich people in my parable are 1.2 million EV drivers, a group not known for understating their contribution to the selfless pursuit of Net Zero, especially when the contribution is funded by subsidies from public taxation and additional costs on everyone else’s energy bills.
Why am I distinguishing between these two groups – the 1.4 million sub-optimal home dwellers and the 1.2 million expensive EV drivers? Because, in many ways they can be compared, at least in the desire for cheap, off-peak electricity. Of course, you may be thinking, isn’t this where ‘smart meters’ come in? Isn’t the idea that they can differentiate between groups of users to provide more tailored tariffs? Unfortunately, the £20bn or so spent on ‘smart meters’ doesn’t seem to be delivering anything smart.
As a child I remember my father having a Ford Sierra in ‘burnt gold’. Today, like many other things, the choice of car paint has changed. Long gone are the days when Henry Ford could say, “you can have any color you like as long as it’s black”. Today’s customer Elon Musk seems to be saying, “paint it any color you like, but for us, we’ll always see it as ‘burnt goodness'”.
If our widow with three night storage heaters could buy off-peak electricity for the same price as an EV driver, she would save around £500 a year – more than the amount she would have lost if she hadn’t collected the winter fuel allowance. .
You may never have thought for a second, so it may surprise you to learn that a night storage heater uses the same amount of electricity as an EV that drives around 11,000 miles a year. A study cited in This is Money it is suggested that the average number of miles covered by an EV is, at 8,292, slightly lower than the distance traveled by an average combustion car. So, for most EV drivers, they use less electricity than they use for night heaters. But of course, while our EV driving eco-warriors tend to have only one EV, our widows have three or four night-storage heaters. While our EV champion spends less than £200 a year on 2,750 kWhs of electricity off-peak at 7p per kWh to push the car 11,000 miles, our widow gets a bill of around £350, 75% more, every night. – storage heater.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The market for EV drivers is quite competitive with prices in the range of 6.9p to 10p per kWh, as illustrated on the right side of the table, taken from Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert site and reproduced in Figure 1.
On the contrary, as can be seen in Figure 1, the price of kWh for the conventional Economy 7, or “off-peak (night) rate” electricity ranges from 10.95p to 14.85p, in some cases twice as expensive.
Is there anything special about the ‘EV destined’ dead-up electricity compared to the Economy-7 electricity earmarked for our widow’s night storage heater? Of course not. There is no reason why electric companies should not give the same price to Economy-7 users as EV users. In fact, Dale Vince’s Ecotricity looks like that, well done Dale. So why didn’t British Gas or EON do the same?
In general, I don’t like regulators. We only have regulators when markets don’t work properly. It is clear that the electricity market is not functioning properly. But if we’re going to have a regulator, why not step in here and require the energy companies to follow Dale Vince’s lead and not discriminate against widows and night storage heaters for the rich on EVs?
More importantly, why didn’t Ed Milliband present the potential savings if all night heater users switched to Ecotricity?
Why didn’t Milliband go further and encourage widows to install night storage heaters? A large-scale national scheme can easily fetch installed prices of up to around £300 for the most sophisticated units, roughly the same cost as a hefty winter fuel allowance. We have no shortage of electricity at night which can be cheaper than gas and immediately replace renewable energy sources for fossil fuels.
Of course, Milliband could argue that instead of bothering with night storage heaters, he wants to install millions of heat pumps. But look at it from the widow’s point of view. If they only hope to live another five or 10 years, they’ll be furious that they’re wasting the money they’ve wasted on their children on a £25,000 heat pump installation that won’t pay for itself in their lifetime (if, of course, they never pay it back. pay back in his own lifetime).
Why not go for the low hanging fruit and get night storage heaters in thousands of homes? Oh, and while we’re at it, we can tell the widow that her contribution to ‘climate change’ (assuming she cares) is worth more than the contribution of the rich guy who just destroyed the Y-class Tesla. .
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