“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”
Also, a lot of people are sharing stuff without checking that it is correct. I would be embarrassed.
TLDR:
WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Average energy costs in the UK are €2,960, €650 in France and Belgium, €620 in Spain, €558 in Germany and Denmark, €546 in Holland, €545 in Austria and €543 in Norway, €476 in Finland and €174 in Poland.
OUR VERDICT
These are not average energy costs in each country. They are actually the wholesale prices of electricity per megawatt hour for a single hour in December 2022.
In January 2023, out of the countries in the post, electricity cost the most in Germany at 54c per kilowatt hour, followed by Denmark, where it was 53c. In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.
There’s a lot of bollocks spouted here on r/UK how we pay the most for energy yet when I speak to friends in Germany and Netherlands they report almost exactly the same prices. Shows typical mentality of this sub. Shame. I’d like a decent UK sub…
Price was brutally used to ration use this winter. It sucks, but with lower prices it was very common for people to be wearing t-shirts and walking around in a house heated to 24C or thereabouts through the winter. We would likely have seen power cuts had “normal” consumption taken place. However, nowhere near enough is being done to help those on the lowest incomes to simply be able to cook and heat to any degree of comfort (by which I mean a minimum indoor temperature of 18C as recommended by WHO – especially for elderly and vulnerable people). The showering of £66 a month on every household regardless of means was a shocking abrogation of government responsibility and naked politics. The help should have been far more targeted and vulnerable people should have been checked to ensure they weren’t sitting in the cold and dark.
These price spikes in the day-ahead market are pretty common, and they work both ways – there have been times when prices on the continent have been much higher than in the UK. They are sometimes caused by a technical fault in the system resulting in an unplanned drop in power delivery (e.g. a transformer problem in one of the cross-channel interconnectors) which means that grid operators have to find an extra GW or two of supply at short notice, and during peak hours (i.e. 6-7pm) when generation capacity is already pretty constrained, whatever reserve is left tends to be pretty damn expensive to bring online.
Subreddit in shambles having once again fallen for facebook tier fake infographics.
Bonus points when they complain about their political opponents having been tricked into voting the way they did in 2016 ‘because they’re dumb’ and lack ‘critical thinking skills’..
All I know is that my household is paying over 4 times what we were last year. We are paying more than monthly £500 for energy.
This subreddit is a hellhole of biased, swayed information.
If you don’t follow the mods viewpoint on a particular subject, your post isn’t visible.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve visited a post with 500+ comments, only to see less than 100 visible, all saying pretty much the same thing.
I’ll probably get banned for saying this.
From the bottom:
>In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.
These are the facts, according to full fact (who imo do a good job fact checking things). So, yes the methodology was flawed, but when you get to the nub of it, energy prices in the UK are almost double the EU average.
This info (47c vs 29c) should have been at the top, because I guarantee many people will read the headline and proudly congratulate themselves on their stance that we’re not paying over the odds for our energy.
As the article itself says in terms of price per kilowatt hour:
‘In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.’
We are still way above the European average price for energy and our rises have been unprecedented and will go even higher in April.
These price increases have meant people have literally frozen in their home, had to choose between eating and heating, whilst these energy price rises have caused businesses to go under left right and centre.
Let’s not let a misleading online stat distract from the truth – our energy prices are a rip off and they could and should be much lower.
So did the MP share it without bothering to check his source or was he aware that it’s want true and retweeted it for political gain? Either way, it reflects poorly on him
11 comments
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”
Also, a lot of people are sharing stuff without checking that it is correct. I would be embarrassed.
TLDR:
WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Average energy costs in the UK are €2,960, €650 in France and Belgium, €620 in Spain, €558 in Germany and Denmark, €546 in Holland, €545 in Austria and €543 in Norway, €476 in Finland and €174 in Poland.
OUR VERDICT
These are not average energy costs in each country. They are actually the wholesale prices of electricity per megawatt hour for a single hour in December 2022.
In January 2023, out of the countries in the post, electricity cost the most in Germany at 54c per kilowatt hour, followed by Denmark, where it was 53c. In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.
There’s a lot of bollocks spouted here on r/UK how we pay the most for energy yet when I speak to friends in Germany and Netherlands they report almost exactly the same prices. Shows typical mentality of this sub. Shame. I’d like a decent UK sub…
Price was brutally used to ration use this winter. It sucks, but with lower prices it was very common for people to be wearing t-shirts and walking around in a house heated to 24C or thereabouts through the winter. We would likely have seen power cuts had “normal” consumption taken place. However, nowhere near enough is being done to help those on the lowest incomes to simply be able to cook and heat to any degree of comfort (by which I mean a minimum indoor temperature of 18C as recommended by WHO – especially for elderly and vulnerable people). The showering of £66 a month on every household regardless of means was a shocking abrogation of government responsibility and naked politics. The help should have been far more targeted and vulnerable people should have been checked to ensure they weren’t sitting in the cold and dark.
These price spikes in the day-ahead market are pretty common, and they work both ways – there have been times when prices on the continent have been much higher than in the UK. They are sometimes caused by a technical fault in the system resulting in an unplanned drop in power delivery (e.g. a transformer problem in one of the cross-channel interconnectors) which means that grid operators have to find an extra GW or two of supply at short notice, and during peak hours (i.e. 6-7pm) when generation capacity is already pretty constrained, whatever reserve is left tends to be pretty damn expensive to bring online.
Subreddit in shambles having once again fallen for facebook tier fake infographics.
Bonus points when they complain about their political opponents having been tricked into voting the way they did in 2016 ‘because they’re dumb’ and lack ‘critical thinking skills’..
All I know is that my household is paying over 4 times what we were last year. We are paying more than monthly £500 for energy.
This subreddit is a hellhole of biased, swayed information.
If you don’t follow the mods viewpoint on a particular subject, your post isn’t visible.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve visited a post with 500+ comments, only to see less than 100 visible, all saying pretty much the same thing.
I’ll probably get banned for saying this.
From the bottom:
>In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.
These are the facts, according to full fact (who imo do a good job fact checking things). So, yes the methodology was flawed, but when you get to the nub of it, energy prices in the UK are almost double the EU average.
This info (47c vs 29c) should have been at the top, because I guarantee many people will read the headline and proudly congratulate themselves on their stance that we’re not paying over the odds for our energy.
As the article itself says in terms of price per kilowatt hour:
‘In the UK it was 47c (42p) while the European average was 29c.’
We are still way above the European average price for energy and our rises have been unprecedented and will go even higher in April.
These price increases have meant people have literally frozen in their home, had to choose between eating and heating, whilst these energy price rises have caused businesses to go under left right and centre.
Let’s not let a misleading online stat distract from the truth – our energy prices are a rip off and they could and should be much lower.
So did the MP share it without bothering to check his source or was he aware that it’s want true and retweeted it for political gain? Either way, it reflects poorly on him