I don't believe it, not for one second, unless someone else is taking a much bigger cut before it gets to suppliers. Would love to see a set of those numbers from 3,5,10 years back etc.
For a start 720/1690 is 42%, which implies they're paying ~ 10p wholesale for electric, which isn't true, it's almost half that now already, and will be less over summer. Interestingly it seems that ofgem use the average "futures" price, for the whole of the last quarter, which is completely nuts, the futures price now is half that....and that's for the future! It's probably going to be a lot less at the time, we have a whole spring, summer and autumn to come, and there's zero evidence that next winter should even cost as much as this winter.
Effectively the price cap is being based on 10p wholesale where as they're all locking in 5p wholesale now, so they just made 20% more profit for nothing.
There is no way in hell that the "extras" would be 60% of their listed costs 3,5,10 years back and I'll eat my hat if that's the case now.
If those numbers were true (as well as the rest of the numbers making up the total) Octopus wouldn't even exist, and there certainly wouldn't be a tracker or agile tarriff etc. Obviously there's a hell of a lot of "skimming" going on, but skimming is meant to take an un-noticeable piece, but it's being taken in many areas.
Sure there's been inflation, but most of that has been caused by energy price hikes, so it's like a self feeding feedback loop of cons, they gain more on the way up (based on futures prices), and they gain twice as much on the way down as they don't acknowledge futures prices, and that's if they bring it down. If they don't bring it down or are allowed to bring it down slower they can milk the end users dry, as they have no other alternative, as it's a monopoly, or all the monopoly players are on the same side. They call it a "price cap", yet when the rates were 35p, the energy companies were still getting paid 70p, and the tax payer funded the difference down to 35p (so we were really paying 70p). Now the price cap is 29p, so the energy companies get 29p, no government funding, yet no fixed rates below 29p, strange huh? Also not forgetting it's still that price till April, which means 25p till end of August, lucky them.
