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Not my quote.
In my apartment it's tricky. In my summer home, it's fully on solar. (Not connected to the grid what so ever)
I think it would be lol
Ah, here is the problem. Actually, that is not obvious at all. Quite the opposite actually.
I express myself in foreign currencies on a daily basis. I do not even reflect over it, it just comes naturally. If someone asks me how much my Google Workspace costs, I say $6. I have never in my life payed $6 for my Workspace account, I pay 64.32 SEK, but why would I say that unless the person I am talking to also pays in SEK? If you ask me how much my VPS at Inception Hosting costs, I will answer in dollars, although I pay for it in SEK.
You assuming that just because I expressed the prices in GBP I have to be talking about UK is probably what confused you from the beginning. That is not, have not, and never will be the case. So just to clarify: I have never talked about UK, I have no idea what electricity costs in the UK, and I will continue to express myself in foreign currencies while on an international forum, and this does not in any way mean that I am only talking about the country that currency belongs to.
If you said you bought a laptop for USD 300 my brain would do a quick estimate to what that is in SEK. That's it. I would not make any assumption as to where you are from, where you bought the laptop, where the laptop is from or whether you paid in USD, budweiser or sexual favors. I would simply, for my own sake, convert it to my own currency in my head to get a reasonable feel for the value, but other then that I would make no assumptions at all.
That I can understand. I usually do not use it that way on international forums, but I copy and pasted the prices from the website.
It's like when the Americans do mm/dd/yy dates, that fucked up way of writing dates has bitten me in the ass more than once.
Unfortunately,
US Dollar, GBP and Euro are reaching parity. Or close to it.
https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD
I have great admiration (and empathy) for the accounting folks who deal with multiple currencies on a day to day basis. Especially now.
To be honest, I'm kind of losing the will to live on this subject, but I'm still at a loss why a Swede would randomly quote some made up numbers in pounds, when all the discussion of prices up to that point had been in Euros.
Anyway, I'm still waiting to see some evidence of a single instance where someone's bill has gone up 10 times in the last year. If it's as widespread a problem as you say it is, it should be very easy for you to find someone who has been affected by it to this extent.
Now serving! Get your popcorn here! All the popcorn you can eat AND MORE!
Just a few BilohBucks per container! Get Your Popcorn Now!
More people should think about what the green movement actually does, instead of what they claim to be doing.
Yikes, i heard of this happening in estonia.
Do you need this notarized with court judgement that it is real?
Seriously, people don't often take photos etc. when their contracts arrive etc. But this is happening, even if it's not happening to you specifically.
Fixed rate contracts has been here now around the 60c mark, couple years back 6c or even under was the norm ... Someone coming out of a 2 year fixed rate right now can find themselves with 10x the electricity price. This has been happening, there is no doubt about it. Except ofc it cannot be real because this did not happen You personally, right? Maybe the moon doesn't exist neither, and electricity is actually a figment of imagination because You cannot touch it?
Surely, surely, surely there must be one person in the whole of Europe who has some kind of proof of this 10x rise if it is real.
Except that this "60c" is double the current price anywhere as far as I'm aware, and "6c" would have been insanely cheap even 5 years ago.
But sure, if it's happening, someone will have documented it right?
You're pretty convinced it's happening. If you want to prove it, why don't you show your bill? Or... is it just happening to that "someone else"?
Well, that's unfortunate, but really, that's on you. As I said, I regularly qoute prices in different currencies since on an international forum, few people talk about SEK. Dollars, euros or pounds are currencies that I would assume the vast majority of people have at least a decent grasp of its current value.
I will try to remember to always quote prices in SEK to avoid confusing you. Maybe I should type in Swedish too, does the fact that I speak English make you assume that I'm from an English speaking country?
If you think I will run around and collect peoples personal electricity bills to show to a buffoon on a forum, you are wildly mistaking. I have already showed you that electricity prices has gone up over 1000%, if that does not correlate to bills going up the same amount, I don't see how a picture of a bill would make it more obvious.
I will not dox myself by showing my bills, but in one years time it has gone from 114.77 SEK to 1018.11 SEK. Please observe that prices are in SEK, I recently learned that I am not allowed to convert them to another currency since I am only allowed to state prices in the currency of the country I live in.
That is for my small apartment in the city, it's basically only used as a place to sleep when I work, and it does not use electricity for heating. It is also located in SE03 which is not the most expensive area. Not quite 1000% but then again, this is not from the most affected area. I do have a house that consumes a lot more electricity, but it's a 3 hour one-way drive to go there to collect a bill, and that's not going to happen. The house is also up north, so its in an area with an even lower tariff then my apartment. The biggest increase is in the southern parts, and again, if you understood the power grid, you would know this.
@ralf can I just ask why it is so monumentally important for you to prove that the price of electricity has not gone up 1000% in Sweden? Do you have some kind of personal stake in the European power grid? (I know you don't, you don't even have a basic understanding of its design, but anyway)
If you claimed that UK prices have gone up one million percent, I would not care. Not the slightest. Not even if you expressed it in SEK. I have no interest in the UK market, I know nothing about it, so why should I question it? But for some reason it is almost like you are personally offended by the price of electricity in Sweden? Why is that?
Curious..Will the new government in Sweden lower energy tariffs? I understand due to supply situation and utility agreements may not allow. But some sort of subsidy or tax breaks?
"Nordpool plan which just did €4.80/kWH last month."
If a litre of diesel is under 3 times the rate (€4.80 x 3 = €14.40) it would be worth looking at buying a diesel generator and disconnecting from the grid
https://www.walkerland.ca/lister-type-diesel-engines-off-grid-generator/
To be fair, it was an one off thing. It's usually anywhere from €400-800 per mWH.
It's because it's usually said in mm/dd/yy format verbally (and I still prefer that), but I think in recent years us North Americans are doing yyyymmdd in writing, but I don't know about the French Canadians.
That sounds even worse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
yyyymmdd is actually imho the best way, from largest to smallest. therefore while sorting you get a proper ordering, and while human is reading you get the relevance from the first 4 characters at a glance. -- tho for humands ddmmyyyy works mostly just as well
I lived in Gujarat (Surat) for 4 years when Modi was CM. In 4 years, the power cut was only for 1-2 days, and it was due to the devastating earthquake.
States, where people love freebies, have fun with power cuts. Those people should not complain.
They are discussing price caps, lower taxes and all sorts of things so something will most likely happen. Due to the way the european power grid is setup they cant really do much about the tariffs, but they will have to do something in some way or people will lose their homes.
Kejriwal incoming in the autorickshaw with free power
I was going to let this go, but if you're going to start name calling, I'm just going to make one last response.
You know what. That "really isn't on me". You made this statement:
In the last few months, plenty of people have making this kind of bullshit claim in the British press to try to score political points, and every time is is shown to be bullshit. People do it because they have an agenda to push and they know the lie will grab people's attention, and they'll never bother reading the proof that it was a lie.
And just to make the point even clearer, the statement as written is untrue. Nobody has received a bill in GBP that has gone up 10x in the last year. The longest fixed term tariff in the UK energy market is 24 months, and not now, but next month after the 40% rise, will be around double what they were 2 years ago.
Not only that, but the average family house will have billed capped at £2500 per YEAR. There might be someone who manages to spend £3000 per MONTH on their electricity (maybe King Charles III will have a shock when he moves into his new digs), but they definitely do not represent the majority of people.
Even though this kind of claim is untrue, it has been promoted several times by people wishing to push a particular agenda, and each time it is shown to be false.
And yet you decided to use GBP to make this claim. Specifically the fact you used GBP makes me think you read this kind of bullshit headline somewhere and just parroted it because it suited your agenda to do so. In the absence of your statement specifically stating the context was not the UK, by shifting the currency from euros to GBP you had effectively signalled it was about the UK.
The entire conversation up to that point had been about gas in Europe and prices in euros. When somebody introduces a different currency, it signifies that the new currency is relevant to the point and moreover signifies that those values are actually in that currency. If the numbers themselves were completely made up, why even add a currency at all? Why not keep it in euros? But you instead chose to use pounds, a currency not native to you, nor used in the conversation to that point. If it was to make it easier for everyone, why not use euros, which were already in use as the subject of discussion.
Rather than admitting your quote was wrong, that both the numbers and currency were completely arbitrary and fictitious, you instead kept insisting they were true.
When I gave specific details proving that they couldn't be true, rather than just admitting that they were entirely made up and fictitious, you instead made something else up. Now, to be honest, I can kind of understand that. If you have a currency that absolutely nobody gives a damn about, then I can understand why you might want to talk about other currencies instead. That still doesn't explain why you'd not use the currency already in use for the discussion. It also doesn't even explain why you'd make up numbers if all you wanted was to say there was a 10x increase.
Except the real reason is that it was a lie, in an attempt to legitimise your claim. You plucked two numbers out of your ass, and then in an attempt to legitimise it, you stuck on a currency that your thought would make it sound more plausible.
Even "A lot of families do not have that kind of margins" is bullshit because you admitted you made up the numbers. If ANY family is paying £3000 a month in ANY country for a family house, the solution isn't to whine and bitch about the price of electricity. It's to learn how to turn things off.
Even when you finally gave an example in your own currency of 114.77 SEK to 1018.11 SEK. I'll convert that to a real currency for you, as you think that'll make it easier on everyone. That's £9.34 to £82.89. I mean, damn man, yeah no family is going to have that kind of money lying around. Sucks to be you.
But actually, let's dig into those numbers a bit. The first one, £9.34. You say that's for a small apartment, but you know what. That's less than the standing charge in my bill. If I used ZERO electricity, I'd still be paying more than you.
But even the second one, £82.89. Given the average salary in the UK is £38131, that represents a take home pay of £2469 per month. I don't know Swedish figures, but google suggests the average salary is similar, but I cba to find out the take home because I neither know nor care about your tax system. That extra rise in energy, even if true, and even if it was 10%, represents 3.3% of your take home pay. That's going to be really damn hard for all those families without that kind of margin.
So then, the question is how much bigger are all these other houses compared to yours? Double, three times, four times, five times? And these people just have these massive houses but somehow are living on razor thin margins each month? How large is the palace that these families are living in that their bill is 30x yours?
Sure, there are going to be SOME people who are going to struggle. They'll be exactly the same kind of people who are struggling already. The kind on really low wages. And I really feel sorry for them, I do, but the energy rises isn't their main problem. It's that they're living in a society that thinks it's acceptable for a portion of their population to be living so close to the poverty line that every day they have to make the choice between eating, replacing clothes, using water, and yes also using energy. For those people, any rise in anything will adversely affect them. However, this world is still energy abundant, and the cost of energy is a tiny percentage of our cost of living.
So, back to the point. It's not monumentally important to me at all. I honestly couldn't care less about the energy price in Sweden.
After showing that your original claim was bullshit, and then after you moved the goalposts to something along the lines of "someone somewhere has a bill that was approximately the value of £300 and now it's approximately the value of £3000", I was simply interested to know whether in fact this statement was true anywhere at all. Because once my BS alarm is triggered, it makes me sceptical about the rest of someone's claims.
I've already said how a large portion of energy bills in the UK (and I presume most other places too) is a standing charge. This is a sizeable chunk, in fact about 25% of my bill. It does not in fact follow that a 10% rise in the per-kWh price will translate to a 10% rise in someone's bill. In fact, this will only be true for a household that uses a disproportionately high amount of energy compared to the average family.
If this problem was widespread, there would be loads of people giving their specific examples all over the internet. I find it hard to believe that not one of the, presumably numerous stories that would cover this in the press, would have a picture of a before and after bill (with appropriate parts obscured for privacy, of course). Apparently not though, you couldn't come up with a single one. Clearly that kind of journalism is only popular in the UK.
So, you did provide some numbers, which in the absence of any actual proof, I'll take your word for as being true, despite you previous propensity to make up numbers and swear blind they're true. But, I'll believe you. I guess, as you haven't told us, that this represents the majority of people in Sweden - coming off an insanely low rate and now having to pay the same as everyone in the UK is paying. You know what, if that's the case then it sucks for you that you now have to pay the true cost of energy like everyone else. Still, you had a good time while it lasted though, right?
But still, I find it hard to believe if your bill is about £100 per month that there are some family homes in Sweden that have bills of £3000. That was, after all, an integral part of your original claim - that families don't have the margins to go from £300 a month to £3000. Well, I'm sure there probably is at least one family somewhere, but to say it represents the majority of the population seems a little disingenuous. What are they doing that they can use as much electricity in a day as you use in a month?
Anyway, I doubt that anything I say is ever going to convince you that your original statement was untrue when taken at face value, so I'm going to leave it there.
Enjoy your winter, stay frosty! (But stay warm if you can)
Don't be like that. You should send some humanitarian packages up to the Kingdom of Sweden and while you're doing that don't forget to throw in some Amazon gift cards.
After being quite grumpy from writing my last post, that cheered me up no end! Thanks!
FWIW, last year our unit rate was 18.21p/kWh and the latest bill (note, before the rise due next month) is 39.5p/kWh - not 10x, but more than double even before the latest round of rises.
Of course, you're ignoring the fact that commercial electricity isn't capped - I haven't talked directly to anyone getting 10x increases, I do personally know people who have been quoted contracts for >3x; given that energy costs are a pretty big slice of most businesses expenses, that's pretty unsustainable.
TL;DR - 10x is probably hyperbole (in the UK market at least), but "oh it might just about double" is also fantasy because it's already done that and we haven't even had the big rise that the government is, allegedly, going to drive us into deeper debt to cover up.
However, the government cap (the debt one) will limit that to 41% and the price cannot rise beyond that for another 2 years. So, in theory, when it goes up by 41% next month, that's it and we'll be on the same price or lower (which is never going to happen) for the foreseeable future. Oh, and we'll get that £400 rebate this year, £67 per month for 6 months, which will probably cover a good chunk of the additional rise for most people over the winter months.
I wasn't aware that industry had no caps on usage at all, though. I guess that will be an additional driver for inflation then.
Unless of course your supplier is exempted from the cap (which mine is, for Reasons(tm)). Certainly, the rebate will help those struggling but it's something of a sticking plaster.
It will; and it's a driver that will take some months to work through - the headline inflation now will have been barely scratched by it.
And of course, all this is just about electricity. Mains gas has gone from an average of around 3.5p/kWh to over 10p, and expected to go up to around 15p next month. And God help you if (like me) you're not on the mains grid and have a tanker of LPG - I don't even want to look at the current price.
Lets make this simple.
The discussion started when you claimed that the rise in prices is merely an inconvenience. I stated that for a lot of people, it is a catastrophe. You disagreed, and I explained that a 1000% increase in electricity prices is more then a lot of families can handle. I have several times quoted prices directly from the power companies websites, facts that you so far have ignored.
The news in Sweden talks daily about how businesses have to shut down and people have to sell their houses because of the electricity prices. I could give you a bunch of links but they are in Swedish, and I guess you are just going to ignore them anyway. Even the EU have emergency meetings about the current state of electricity in Europe almost daily, but I guess that does not make the headlines in the UK since you seem completely unaware of this.
You keep saying that my claim is false just because I gave figures in GBP instead of SEK. That made you assume that I was talking about the UK. That was your assumption, and you making a false assumption does not make my statement false. I will agree that I could have used another currency, and rest assure that I will always express prices in SEK from now on since using different currencies obviously makes it impossible for some people to accept facts.
Still, that misunderstanding was straightened out a lot of posts ago, but you still claim it makes everything I say false. Instead of just accepting it as a misunderstanding once all was explained and move on and discuss the topic at hand instead, you keep coming back to what currency I used. And that is on you.
And, as for made up numbers, this is the average cost per month for Swedish households last year. That is, before the over 1000% increase.
This is the average electricity costs for households in Sweden, and even the average bill is above 3 689 SEK (£300) during the winter months. So we are not talking a few cases or anything extreme or extraordinary, we are talking average families.
And just to be extremely clear, the prices are in SEK.
Source: https://www.energimarknadsbyran.se/
I will give you a point that part of the cost is static and is not affected by the increase. That is true, and something that I had not taken into consideration. That's on me. But still, even if we go with your 25% static which I think is way to high, it is still an extremely big hit on average families which many can not handle.
No, this started precisely here when I called out your BS claim: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3480813/#Comment_3480813
For the last time. You claim was false because of that, but that is not the only reason it was false. As you now prove yourself:
So, it's jumping from £30 a month (I've not had a bill that low for over 10 years BTW) to £300 a month?
Now, go back and look at what you claimed - that the typical rise for people was from £300 to £3000 per month, and how hard it'll be for people because they don't have "that kind of margin" (i.e. £2700) lying around.
Anyway, whatever dude. Continue to believe you're right if you like. I've led you to the water, it's not my problem if you still won't drink.
Again, it is not a bullshit claim. You can not let go of the fact that I expressed the prices in GBP, can you? People use different currencies, that does not change the value, only the unit. It does not make my statement false.
No it was not. That's like saying if I claim a file is 1000 kilobytes but it turns out to be 1 megabyte, my statement is false. It is NOT. The unit changes, not the value!
No. Not at all. That average was last year, before the increase, which I clearly stated. But you conveniently cut out that line when you quoted me, didn't you? Oh, what a coincidence that you managed to miss that line in particular, right? One would think that the fact that I listed averages for the entire year would be a clue to that it was last year (besides the fact that I clearly stated so in text) but what do I know, you guys in the UK maybe invented timetravel or something.
The average before the increase was well above the equivalent of £300 (ah, see what I did there? Not pounds, I'm not allowed to use that, but the equivalent of pounds).
I did, and it holds. You quoted only parts of my text to try to make it look that the current average is £300, while I clearly stated that that was the average before the increase. Cutting out snippets of someones text when quoting might sometimes work, but not when you are talking to the person that wrote the original text, they will notice that you changed it.
Now, go back and look at what you claimed, that there is no way electricity bills can be that high. Lets do some math. I'll help you, I get a feeling its not one of your strong sides.
The average electricity bill before prices started to increase was 4545 SEK in December (last years December, here in Sweden we have not had December in 2022 yet). It's not even the most expensive month of the year, but for your sake I'll go with it. Again, lets go with your assumption that 25% of the bill is a static cost. That's noway near true, but again, I'll do it for you.
25% of 4545 is 1136.25. That leaves 3408.75 SEK as pure electricity costs. It's not £300, I'll admit that, its only £277 so one point for you. Alltough I never claimed that £300 was the average, but I'll give it to you anyway.
A 1000% increase on the 3408.75 is 34087.5 SEK. Add back the 25% static and we are at 35000 SEK, rounding way down. Thats the equivalent of, and I'm rounding way down again, £2800.
I have no knowledge of what kind of money an average family in the UK have to spend, but in Sweden very few average families can deal with an electricity bill of £2800 for more then one, possibly two months without running into debts, fast. Especially if they just lost their job.
Remember, we are counting low here with your estimates of static costs, rounding way down on every calculation and only a 1000% increase while the reality is over 1200%. And it's just average, a lot of bills are lower but a lot of bills are higher.
You have done no such thing. I have provided you with facts, sources and calculations, all you have done is rant on and on about "you used pounds but you live in Sweden so everything you say is therefore false!".
I have a colleague with wife and three children. He told me today that he just finished sealing the second floor of their house and shutting down the heating upstairs to prepare for winter. They are now living 2 adults and 3 kids in 1 kitchen and 2 bedrooms because they can not afford to heat the entire house. Everytime I read a newspaper or watch the news, businesses are shutting down or people are selling their home.
This happens at the same time as some buffoon on an internet forum that clearly has no grasp whatsoever of the Swedish or even European power market tells me that electricity in Sweden really can not be that expensive. I'm sorry, but it just does not sit well with me.
Whatever man. Have a lovely winter.