Weekend press: Three suppliers force-fitted 70% of PPMs as bills rocketed

In our latest round-up of the weekend’s national news coverage, the government has revealed that British Gas, Scottish Power and OVO force-fitted seven in ten of all the prepayment meters installed using court warrants last year. Elsewhere, Ovo has launched a tariff that is cheaper than the government’s cap on household bills.

British Gas, Scottish Power and OVO force-fitted 70% of prepayment meters as energy bills rocketed

Just three energy companies force-fitted seven in ten of all the prepayment meters installed using court warrants last year in what Grant Shapps has described as a “horrifying picture” of widespread forcing of the devices into homes.

Data provided to the Energy Security Secretary by suppliers shows that an estimated 94,201 gas and electricity meters were installed using the warrants in 2022 – an average of 7,850 a month. British Gas, Scottish Power and OVO Energy fitted 66,187 of them according to the data – 70 percent of the total.

It comes after i revealed earlier this month using separate data provided by the firms to industry regulator Ofgem that the overall number of forced meter installations increased by more than 40 percent in 2022 at a time when fuel bills were rocketing and with a winter fuel poverty crisis looming.

Mr Shapps, revealing the most “overzealous” suppliers as he doubled-down on his call for firms to rectify any mistreatment of vulnerable customers, said: “Today’s figures give a clear and horrifying picture of just how widespread the forced installation of prepayment meters had become.”

According to suppliers’ own data released by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), British Gas installed 25,000 prepay meters using warrants in 2022, followed by Scottish Power with 24,320 and OVO Energy with 16,867. Behind them was EON with 10,220, EDF with 7,240 and Shell with 4,145. They were followed by Utilita with 2,559, Bulb with 2,091, Utility Warehouse with 1,489, Tru Energy with 101, Ecotricity with 79, Good Energy with 58 and Octopus with 32.

Scottish Power installed the highest number of prepayment meters relative to the size of its customer base, the department said. i has contacted the firm for a response.

The Government department said the suppliers’ data was received in January and February and was based on their best estimates at that time.

At a Commons select committee hearing on 14 March, Centrica chief Mr O’Shea said the number of prepayment meters the firm had installed under warrant had fallen from 21,000 in 2021 to 20,469 in 2022. Centrica said on Sunday that this figure – 4,531 lower than the 25,000 the firm told Mr Shapps – was its “verified and correct” final number of installations under warrant for 2022.

Last week Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of British Gas owner Centrica was heavily criticised after it was reported he will receive a pay package worth almost £4.5m for 2022, despite having to apologise for the company’s conduct around prepayment meters.

Mr Shapps said: “Prepayment meters are right for some people, so I do not want to ban them outright, but I do have concerns that companies have not been treating their customers fairly, over an already difficult winter during which the government has tried to help families by paying around half the energy bill of the average household.

“After my calls for change, I’m pleased that suppliers have made their actions public and agreed to put a stop to forcing prepayment onto vulnerable customers for good – but this cannot happen again.

“I will be watching Ofgem’s ongoing review closely so customers get the support they need and those vulnerable consumers who have wrongly suffered forced installations get the justice they deserve in the form of redress.”

Separate figures also published today by the DESNZ show that 7.6 million Energy Bills Support Scheme vouchers have now been redeemed by households that use prepayment meters. It said those with the most vouchers still outstanding, with nearly 400,000 yet to be redeemed at the start of February, include Scottish Power, OVO and British Gas.

i

Ovo launches energy deal below government price cap

Energy giant Ovo has launched its first deal for customers cheaper than the government’s cap on household bills.

The firm will offer a fixed 12-month tariff of £2,275 for existing customers, at a time when the government is limiting typical household bills to £2,500.

It comes as falling wholesale gas prices start feeding through to bills.

One expert urged caution on Ovo’s deal, predicting there would be cheaper deals in the months to come.

Ovo Energy, which provides power to more than four million homes, said it was launching the tariff because customers wanted “the security of a long term fix to protect them against the continuing energy price uncertainty”.

But Mr Martin Lewis, from MoneySavingExpert, said: “People need to be very careful not to just jump on a fix because it costs less than they’re paying right now… because wholesale rates – the rates energy firms pay – have dropped, it’s likely the price cap will drop, and on current predictions that means you’ll start paying 20% lower rates than now. That price is predicted to stay around that point until the end of the year, and into early 2024.”

Experts have been predicting household bills will fall this summer as suppliers strike new long-term deals to buy cheaper gas.

At that point the government’s Energy Price Guarantee (EPG) – which is being held at current levels until the end of June – will no longer be needed, they add.

Last month analysts at Cornwall Insight forecasted that Ofgem’s energy price cap – which in normal times limits what suppliers can charge per unit of energy – will fall to £2,153 a year from July.

BBC

Energy firms call for windfall tax to fall with prices

Energy firms have called on ministers to reduce the windfall tax as oil and gas prices fall, ahead of a package of measures on energy security expected to be announced on Thursday.

Trade body Offshore Energies UK said that “when prices drop, it is fair that the windfall tax should fall away”.

It came as the Financial Times reported that ministers are set to offer energy firms relief on windfall taxes.

The Treasury insists it keeps all taxes under review.

Last year, the government introduced a windfall tax on oil and gas firms, to help fund its scheme to lower energy bills for households and businesses.

A windfall tax is used to target firms which benefit from something they were not responsible for. Energy firm profits have soared recently, initially due to rising demand after Covid restrictions were lifted, and then because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised energy prices.

Oil and gas prices have now come down from their highs.

David Whitehouse, chief executive of Offshore Energies UK, said the windfall tax has “damaged the confidence” of companies to invest in the long-term energy security of the UK.

“If this tax is changed, as conditions and prices have changed, that would be a positive move that would go some way to start rebuilding confidence,” he said.

He added it would also spur companies to invest in the UK energy industry and in new technologies such as offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture, as well as in jobs.

It comes as the government is expected to set out measures to boost the UK’s energy security on Thursday.

A Whitehall source confirmed the plans, which will be set out by the Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps, will focus on bringing down wholesale electricity prices in the UK and reducing energy bills for consumers and businesses.

The Financial Times reported that ahead of this, ministers have been holding talks with energy firms about adjusting the windfall tax if oil and gas prices dropped below a certain level.

Shadow climate secretary, Ed Miliband said the report was more evidence that next week’s announcements would be “Fossil Fuel Thursday”.

He said it would see “giveaways to companies already making record profits, for a policy that will make no difference to energy bills or security, fleecing the public whilst trashing the climate.”

The Treasury insists it does not comment on speculation.

BBC

Raw sewage dumped into English waterways 800 times a day

Raw sewage was dumped into rivers and coastal areas across England more than 300,000 times last year despite a fall in the overall number, official data will reveal.

Figures due to be published by the Environment Agency on Friday are expected to show that the number of times sewage pollution was spilt from storm overflows reduced by almost a fifth in 2022 from the year before, according to preliminary data seen by The Times.

Last year’s reductions appear to be due a combination of improvements by water firms and a dry year with a months-long drought. Rainfall was 90 per cent of the long-term annual average.

However, the number of spills is still at 300,953, a figure labelled “appalling” by campaigners and equivalent to 824 spills a day. The amount of time untreated sewage was released into waterways also fell by 34 per cent from 2021, but was still at 1.7 million hours.

The Times can also reveal that hundreds of locations are still unmonitored, including in the constituency of Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, meaning the true number of spills will be higher.

Ash Smith, of the Oxfordshire-based charity Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, said it was “great” the numbers “are down a bit”, but added: “Is that down to the weather or the water companies? We know they had an easy ride, it was a drought. It’s [still] appalling. It’s way too high”.

Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer and now water activist who has backed The Times’ Clean it Up campaign, said: “It’s time to pull the handle, a full flush, a total restructuring of the industry all the way from No 10 to your local sewage overflow.”

Stuart Colville, director of strategy at industry body Water UK, said: “These results are an important milestone, but leave a lot more to do.”

The Times

The £20bn plans to store carbon under the sea

Plans to trap greenhouse gases and store them under the sea will finally be approved as the government unveils its “clean-energy reset”.

Six carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects on the east coast of England and Merseyside will receive £20 billion of funding over the next decade. They are likely to include the Keadby 3 gas-fired power station in Lincolnshire and the HyNet hydrogen power scheme in Liverpool.

Grant Shapps, the energy and net-zero secretary, will present CCS as a key part of Britain’s new industrial strategy and a successor to the dwindling North Sea oil and gas sector. He is considering making the announcement in Aberdeen or Hull and will also publish a detailed timeline for the approval of carbon capture programmes in Scotland.

The investment — which is seen as a huge cash injection for “red wall” seats — will be funded mainly through levies on energy bills.

Ministers have been flirting with CCS technology for more than 20 years and are now under increasing pressure to act, with the UK off-track to hit its legally binding net-zero targets and facing criticism on a number of fronts.

Ministers are framing the announcement on Thursday as a response to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a $369 billion stimulus package for clean energy and transport that has seen green investment flocking to the United States.

Officials in the Treasury and Shapps’s energy department have been discussing measures designed to compete with Washington. They include a ten-year road map for increasing hydrogen production in the UK and planning reforms to allow more ground-mounted and rooftop solar panels. Shapps is also expected to confirm the restart of onshore wind projects after the government was forced to drop its opposition in the face of a backbench Tory rebellion backed by former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Shapps will also launch Great British Nuclear, a public body tasked with supporting the next generation of nuclear power plants and small modular reactors.

The day of the announcement had been dubbed “green day” by those in the energy department but concerned it sounded too idealistic, they have since shifted to the more pragmatic “energy security day”.

CCS is designed to catch greenhouse gases as they are emitted by power stations and other big polluters. They will be piped into the subsea aquifers left behind by old gas and oil wells in the North Sea.

There are very few large carbon storage projects globally, and none has yet convinced critics it can work effectively at scale, though a major carbon-storage scheme went online this month in Denmark and several other European projects are in the works.

The push for CCS has long been viewed with some scepticism by environmentalists, who argue that it creates a route for polluters to continue investing in fossil fuels rather than decarbonising their industries and looking to renewable technologies.

But Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at Edinburgh University, said all climate models recognised that the final 10 to 25 per cent of emissions reductions would require industrial capture of carbon.

“You can pretend that you’re going to do it all by not eating meat and recycling plastic bags — and they definitely do have a contribution, of course — but the problem is so giant you need industrial-scale solutions for this industrial-scale problem,” he said.

Haszeldine said the UK would have had a head start in the development of CCS technology if it had backed BP’s plans for a £500 million scheme in Peterhead near Aberdeen, first proposed in 2005. “The government — particularly the Treasury — wasn’t ready to run with that,” he said. “And we’ve been going around in circles ever since.”

There was another false start in 2015, when the government cancelled a £1 billion competition for CCS six months before it was due to be awarded. “We could create a giant new industry, replacing the present-day oil and gas industry in the North Sea,” Haszeldine said. “Instead, Scandinavian nations and the US have now pushed ahead.”

Experts argue that the geology of the UK, with its ready-made North Sea storage, means we have a natural advantage when it comes to pursuing the technology. “We have all the ingredients to become a world leader in this,” Haszeldine said. “But to be a world leader, you actually need to lead.”

Even green purists acknowledge that some sectors will be very hard to decarbonise, particularly heavy industries such as cement, steel and chemical production. It is these industries that will benefit most from CCS retrofitting.

But the first factories to go ahead with CCS are likely to be gas-fired power stations, which still provide 40 per cent of British electricity despite the soaring contribution of renewables.

The Times

The new parking fine coming for electric car owners

They used to be celebrated as the greenest of cars which could cost nothing to charge, little to park and attract a big tax break when you bought one. But electric car owners are facing a new penalty — the introduction of fines and extra fees if they spend too long at electric charging points.

One driver left his van charging overnight at a service station on the M4, expecting to pay £26, and was horrified when an overstay charge of £123 was levied earlier this month.

From April 1, a new £30 penalty will be charged for those staying for more than an hour in Aberdeen. In Sheffield, the charge will be £20 from the same date. Similar charges have been introduced across most of the Highlands since the start of the year.

In London, ESB Energy has an overstay fee of £8 at 350 charge points after an hour. At GeniePoint, you pay an overstay charge of £10 after 90 minutes, and £10 for every 90 minutes after that.

For some time, Tesla has had an overstay fee of 50p or £1 per minute on its network, depending on how busy the charging station is, while Liberty Charge takes an extra 8p per minute.

The fees have come as a nasty shock to electric vehicle (EV) drivers who were initially encouraged by the government to switch from petrol or diesel with tax breaks and free supermarket and council chargers, but have had to stomach swingeing increases in the price of power.

Even the most rapid chargers take longer than filling up a car with fuel, and the rise of overstay charges means that drivers may not want to risk leaving their car plugged in while busy with other activities, such as shopping or going to a restaurant or cinema.

Paul Jackson, chief executive of The Miles Consultancy, which advises firms on how to cut costs on company cars, said the charges are catching out one in six motorists each month.

He said the van driver on the M4 — whose employer was a client of Jackson’s consultancy — was aggrieved because his employer refused to pay the levy.

The driver insisted he had no choice but to charge overnight because he could not interrupt his work to top up the battery during the working day. “Do you want me to get up at 2am to pick it up?” the driver asked.

There are more than 1.15 million plug-in cars, including both electric and hybrid cars, registered in the UK but fewer than 40,000 public charge points. EV drivers become frustrated if they arrive at charging bays to find a petrol or diesel car parked there, or an electric car which is already fully charged.

The cost of installing chargers, and connecting them to the National Grid, is also so high that charge point operators cannot afford to have them lying idle. It costs £1,000 to £2,500 to install a slow charger in a lamppost; £30,000 to £40,000 for a rapid charger at 50 kWh; and £50,000 to £60,000 for an ultra-rapid charger.

Neil Isaacson, chief executive of Liberty Charge, which will have 4,000 sockets by the end of the year, said: “We have to make sure that our network is available as close to 100 per cent of the time as possible because that is the only way we are ever going to get a return on investment.”

Melanie Shufflebotham, co-founder of Zap-Map, an app used by EV drivers to search for charge points, said: “The introduction of overstay or idling charges makes sense on high-powered rapid chargers where charging time is short and it is important that the chargers are freed up for other EV drivers.” But she said motorists should not be “unfairly penalised” for using low-powered chargers as part of their daily routine. Motorists without driveways or off-street parking are already paying much higher prices than those who can charge up at home.

The Times

First global water conference in 50 years yields hundreds of pledges, zero checks

The first global water conference in almost half a century has concluded with the creation of a new UN envoy for water and hundreds of non-binding pledges that if fulfilled would edge the world towards universal access to clean water and sanitation.

The three-day summit in New York spurred almost 700 commitments from local and national governments, non-profits and some businesses to a new Water Action Agenda, and progress on the hotchpotch of voluntary pledges will be monitored at future UN gatherings. A new scientific panel on water will also be created by the UN.

Overall, organizers said they were happy that governments and representatives from academia, industries, and non-profits had come together to discuss the often neglected topic of water and to commit billions of dollars to improving water security.

But they conceded that more was needed than a set of voluntary commitments such as a formal global agreement, like the 2015 Paris climate accords and the 2022 Montreal biodiversity pact, as well as better data and an international finance mechanism to safeguard water supplies.

“This conference did not give us a mandate for this, but we brought the world together to ensure there is a follow-up,” said Henk Ovink, special envoy for water for the Netherlands, which co-hosted the conference along with Tajikistan. “We have fragmented water governance across the world, fragmented finance and not enough science and data in place.”

“We know our job is still not done and in fact we are falling behind in our task,” said Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore’s senior minister and co-chair of a summit interactive dialogue. “But we know the job can be done. We must now treat water as a global common good to be protected collectively, in the interests of all nations.”

In closing the historic summit, António Guterres, the secretary general of the UN, urged everyone to turn the pledges into action. “All of humanity’s hopes for the future depend, in some way, on charting a new course to sustainably manage and conserve water … it needs to be at the centre of the political agenda.”

Talks ended with a broad agreement that water should be treated as a global common good, and that the world’s approach to water must be less siloed given its nexus with the climate crisis, and food, energy and national security. But with no internationally binding agreement, experts fear that pledges could slide as it will be hard to hold governments, industry and financial institutions to account.

On Friday morning, more than 100 water experts from research institutions and civil society groups across five continents sent a letter to the UN general secretary slamming the lack of “accountability, rigour and ambition” at the conference, arguing that the paucity of scientific rigour and binding agreements will fail to secure the more just, resilient and sustainable water future urgently needed.

“Trying to solve one of the greatest challenges facing humanity with voluntary commitments and solutions based on half-baked evidence is like taking a knife to a gunfight – it simply isn’t good enough, and represents a betrayal of the world’s poor who bear the brunt of the water crisis,” said Nick Hepworth, executive director of Water Witness.

Charles Iceland, global director for water at the World Resources Institute, said only about a third of these announcements were “gamechangers” that would substantially improve the water crisis. “I think the voluntary commitments are a good start … Each voluntary commitment has a place where you talk about how much money is available, most of them left that blank.”

“We need a Paris agreement for water globally, and national water plans for each country, and regional water plans for each shared basin and aquifer,” Iceland added.

The Guardian

Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.