Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "Energy price cap: Households face annual bills of more than £3,500 from October" video.

That 8.8% extra France are paying isn't anything close to the full story. Nor it that percentage wholly down to nationalisation of the energy sector. France has a strong mixed generation network, including nuclear. It also has a high percentage of electrified heating. Combined this makes France far less reliant on gas imports than the UK in the first place. Then France has large gas reserves for what gas needs it does have. This helps to shield France from market pricing and thus reducing costs. Lastly the state run facilities are running at a loss. That means they're still paying higher gas prices, it's just being supplemented through tax revenue which may result in new or higher existing taxes in the future to offset. Nationalisation isn't the answer you're hoping for. The UK has serious, long term infrastructure and systems issues that can only be resolved through significant investment in on-shore energy generation not reliant on imports, and the electrification of heating. The kinds of effective long term fixes the UK needs will take 10-20 years to roll out. That's due to long term bipartisan mismanagement of the country going back to the Thatcher and Major years.
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To be fair, she's the CEO of the industry body representing one of the richest industries on the planet. £50K to her would represent about what she makes in 1-2 days and about 30 seconds worth of profit for her industry. So, I don't think it's malice or spin on her behalf. I think she simply lacks context. For most people, 1 days wage would represent a low income and it would be hard to imagine anyone living on anything less than that. That's despite there being people in the world whom live on less than the daily wage of even the poorer people in developed nations. It's all about context. I wouldn't be too concerned she didn't realise. I'd be more concerned that the bloke interviewing her didn't push back on her statement to provide that context to her.
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@leegilley221 Close. France generates ~70% of it's electricity from nuclear energy. The caveat here of course is that many of these plants are due for decommission and are having their life extended well beyond where it should be. This increases the risk of an accident. I did briefly mention that France uses nuclear in an earlier comment. The focus should not, correction,can not be on the source of energy generation in any particular country. Each countries energy infrastructure and needs are different. The emphasis instead needs to be on ensuring as much on shore generation independent of imports exists in the grid as possible. This can take many forms, nuclear fission being just one, but solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, natural gas, coal, etc. It really depends on the resources at hand in a given country and how they can be exploited best. For the UK wind and tidal make the most sense, and these projects needed to be deployed at much grander scales before the coal power stations were switched off. But it's useless talking about electricity generation when heating in people's homes relies on gas boilers. The UK could produce 20x the necessary electricity supply but if people need gas to heat their homes the reliance on the international market for gas imports remains. A priority has to be made of switching people over to electric heating solutions. Increasing domestic generation of electricity must go hand in hand with electrification of heating. The electrification of heating in France is in reality their smartest move. It means they aren't reliant on gas to heat homes, so they can leverage the domestic grid for the need. That gives France much more power over the price in their domestic market. The problems in the UK are systemic in nature, and came about across bipartisan governments. It isn't a new problem, it's only that now the conditions are ripe to see the problem more clearly. It's going to take the UK 10-20 years to fix the issues, so best start that process now. In the mean time, removing sanctions on Russia will provide some relief in the domestic market, much more relief if the UK can convince the EU to do the same. Delaying the climate goals by another 10-20 years would also grant significant domestic price relief. It's total mismanagement from all sides of politics, that's the problem.
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What do you imagine protests and violence will achieve? You don't understand global trade at all, do you? The problem is the price of imports on the international market are going up, and the UK is heavily reliant on imports. No one in the UK can change the international price of gas.
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Nationalisation won't solve the problem. The problem is over reliance on gas imports and very little on shore gas storage. It didn't occur in the last term, or even the last decade. It occurred over several generations across bipartisan mismanagement of the country. Nationalisation won't change the price of gas, it might increase taxes though to pay for the gas imports if domestic prices became fixed. This can only be solved with real investment into infrastructure. We're talking huge national infrastructure schemes costing 10s, if not 100s of billions of pounds to fix the problem. The UK needs too electrify heating across the country, that means incentives to upgrade existing gas boilers to electric systems. Build on shore electricity generation that isn't reliant on imports to reduce exposure to international market forces. In the short to medium term while infrastructure is built this may require existing generators, such as coal, to come back online. Build on shore gas storage to shield gas prices from spikes and fluctuations. France has all of these things already which is the real secret to the limitations in price rise they're experiencing, not nationalisation.
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@leegilley221 You don't appear to understand what communism is.
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@Hola-fz7jq 🤣 What a stupid thing to say.
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@englishsteve1465 I respectfully disagree with the assertion that it's an effective monopoly, and I outright reject this is a partisan issue down to donors. The domestic UK market rate is cost price the domestic distributors aren't making profits, they're being squeezed. The price of gas is being set by the producers following demand influences in international market The prices are skyrocketing everywhere in the world. If you want to talk about international market prices they're high because of sanctions on Russia and increased demand on the global supply chain caused by the EU abandoning their contracts with Russia. You can't cut out the second largest supplier of natural gas, pushing that demand on to the rest of the producers and expect there won't be consequences to market prices. Italy too has far less reliance on gas than the UK and they have storage. If the UK had large on shore gas storage reserves too the story playing out right now would be substantially different. Because the gas in storage would have been purchased at a cheaper rate shielding the UK from market prices for some period of time. Instead the UK is in a position where it buys gas at the live market rate including all the live fluctuations to the price. You guys have to understand, gas energy prices will continue to increase so long as Russia is cut out of the western market. If you want immediate relief, you either have to end the sanctions on Russia and purchase from them at a discounted rate to market price like France is setting up to do with this routing through Algeria as a result of this weekends deal. Or, you go ahead and ultra rapidly transition your domestic energy consumption away from gas and towards something cheaper, that you can have market control over. Every time the price of anything goes up as a result of this inflationary pressure, that's because of the sanctions imposed against Russia. If you want it to end, you have to end the sanctions. It's a choice between empty ideology and survival.
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@madmesh978 I must apologise, I'm unsure of the relevance of a long dead yankvillain business magnate whose fortune was equally long ago squandered to this discussion. Could you please be so kind as to enlighten me?
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@ritchienithoo9479 Yep. Which is why Macron made a mad dash to Algeria to secure a gas deal. France will purchase Russian gas using Algeria as a third party transaction country. Russia has agreed to give France a discount on gas it sells to France through Algeria. Meanwhile France is the country that pushed hardest to ban Russian gas from the EU. The sanctions are meaningless, they're just causing unnecessary pain domestically. The UK should lift the sanctions immediately and deal with Russia again to reduce consumer cost in the short-medium term whilst it transitions it's energy sources in the ways I previously described.
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I'm sorry, what. Freezing the unit rate helps the most vulnerable fix an expense. Those whom can afford to be irresponsible with fuel, will continue their behaviour regardless of the rising cost. Who do you honestly think you're kidding. Moreover your framing of the wealthy as the enemy is leading you to consider cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
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@Hola-fz7jq You do understand that yankville and Ukraine were the aggressors, right?
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@Hola-fz7jq Did you just say the equivalent of "I know you are but what am I" ? My gosh kid, you're not doing yourself any favours
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@Hola-fz7jq Oh. You think you're having an affect on me beyond making my eyes roll at your immaturity? 🙄
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@Lmwpitt And those oil and gas companies have their pricing effected directly by the sanctions against Russia.
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