Gas Prices

It has been announced today by British Gas that their prices are going up by a staggering thirty-five percent. Now while I realise that energy costs are increasing, I can not see how an increase of this size can be justified.

One of the aspect in the report that I heard that caught my attention was that this single increase will have the effect of raising the British inflation rate by one percent.

There is an irony that this should have been announced as yesterday when returning home I passed by a location where there used to be four gas holders. They are now gone and the land has been developed into housing. As one of the reasons why the UK is so at risk of seeing the effects in the roller coaster ride that is the international gas market is we no longer have the gas holders that were used to store gas. They were sold for housing development and to increase the dividends paid to the shareholders. That very short sighted logic we are all now having to pay the price of.

Further, while at Teesmouth I saw one of the first gas fired power stations that generates our electricity. Before they were built, Britain had gas stocks of North Sea Gas that were going to last until 2075 Now they will last only ten years if that. We now all pay the price for cheap electricity.