8.2%..... three times inflation.

[Workingman]

That is the average of how much SSE is putting its prices up for gas and electricity. The rest of the cartel will obviously follow.

It comes on the back of the warning from Ofgem that the UK has hardly any spare capacity in the system and that we could be in for power cuts as early as this winter. That is a year earlier than their old prediction.

The head of the National Grid says that the crisis is due to a lack of long-term planning by successive governments and a 20% in coal fired supply as they close down without replacement.

Maybe the three are linked? We don't have the supply so we might get power cuts - that would make the politicians look bad. However, if energy is made so expensive that nobody can use much of it the lights might stay on.....

I would not trust politicians NOT to use such a tactic.

[TheOstrich]

The lack of long-term infrastructure planning is by far the most serious aspect to my mind - if there are blackouts, I hope there's a strong backlash against the wretched Green lobby, which seems to have paralysed politicians' collective minds for well over a decade now.

We still haven't signed up for any new nuclear plants ...

[Rodo]

We are with SSE.

[Kaz]

We still haven't signed up for any new nuclear plants ...

And there's the rub!!! If any of the governments of the last twenty years had had the backbone to grasp the political nettle and build some, we would now be reaping the benefits of cheap and clean (preferably nationalised) energy! Not buying it in from foreign companies who charge like wounded rhino as they don't give a monkeys about anything but profit!!!

[Suff]

Nuclear is not the salvation of the UK. We simply will not tolerate so many reactors. We would need to build dozens.

Had our governments done anything, anything at all, but use their energy money to curry favour, then we would be in a better position today than we are.

But that is governments. That is also the people who vote for them....

[Workingman]

Nuclear might not be the salvation, but it should have been the backbone of electricity generation. That it isn't is down to successive governments, all political parties, large parts of the media and more than a few lobby groups.

We can also blame our problems on the first 'dash for gas', which was stupid. From the early 80s it was known that North Sea gas reserves were in decline. So, what did we do? We built gas fired power stations. Why? Because they were cheap and quick to build by comparison to clean coal or nuclear.

We then compounded our previous errors by spending billions of pounds covering the countryside and coastal waters with inefficient windmills. Under normal commercial rules these things would never have been built because the capital outlay could never be recovered, so there had to be bribes, err sorry, subsidies.

O yes, and we sold off our production facilities without making sure that the privateers continued with maintaining an up to date infrastructure. We do that and they rake in the profits.