Friday, October 14, 2011

EU manipulation of Britain's energy prices!

The BBC has just issued this report on Britains excessive energy prices, and soaring profits for the energy companies from £15 per customer to £125 p.a..

This blog has been on that case for years, for one example, read this January 2009 posting on gas price and supply manipulation.

If the regulators really wished to control matters, rather than merely act as a curtain, shielding their political leaders from accountability, for their treason over the EU, they should ask themselves and those they regulate, for the exact corporate ownership lines and contracts between the companies that sell gas in the UK market, the physical capabilities of the Bacton interconnector facility, the actual physical flows, full ownership details and the direction of travel of the volumes actually passing through Bacton.

Most crucially of all, the exact end company ownership and participation in the contracts and spot deals that go towards framing the wholesale gas contract prices, which forms the underpinning basis for the prices, which all the gas suppliers are subsequently permitted to apply to the UK market.

A thorough understanding, must also first be gained, of what eventually became of all the low-priced, fixed price, gas supplies that the oil companies negotiated with the old monopoly buyer, the Gas Council and the political and financial imperatives driving those who allowed that system to end.

One basic essential fact, has to be at the forefront of legislators and regulators minds regarding natural gas, that is that a true free market cannot ever exist. The term "wholesale" surely gives that fact away! Every market participant only benefits from higher prices. That truth itself arises from the fact that natural gas is not a product that can ever be handled, let alone easily or cheaply.

The natural industry requires huge investment, complicated pipeline networks and a sense of decency in the Boardrooms. Methane (the main component of natural gas), it is a fact, when transported by sea has to be cooled to minus 260° a hugely expensive undertaking. I once worked for a natural gas transmission company in the USA, serving the US East Coast with gas from Oklahoma and Texas by pipelines, we were rightly regulated to the nth degree even to the point of the shareholders' dividends!

All involved in the supposed European Wholesale Gas Market, depend upon higher prices for their higher profits. It is therefore not a true market, it is an expensive and clever sham. That is the flaw, as was well known by the politicians when the Gas Council monopoly buying status was terminated. All the rest is sleight of hand, to allow the utility companies to price gouge their UK customers.

How many gas suppliers in Britain now have their trading profits remitted to HMRC for taxation?  In the answer to that last question lies the prospect of potential treason rather than incompetence or stupidity, which has become the politician's normal excuse for such outrages!

Labels: , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home