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It's an interesting rathole to go down. On the one hand, there are private equity firms buying power stations and deliberately turning them off to reduce supply, knowing that National Grid will call them in a few hours paying them an even higher rate to turn them back on... but also those operators get detected and, months later, fined out the wazoo by the regulator for pulling a stunt like that.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/29/gas-fired-p...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/31/uk-electric...

https://www.current-news.co.uk/ofgem-fines-intergen-37m-for-...

Also, electricity isn't any less of a monopoly. You can choose your supplier, but they do no more than administer your metering and billing (including the government insisting they install smart meters). Your house is still connected to the same domestic grid as everybody else, and it's National Grid plc that is selecting who's generating and when, and getting paid for it.



> but also those operators get detected and, months later, fined out the wazoo by the regulator for pulling a stunt like that.

The ones that were detected were fined, we don't know how much of that goes on but more subtly.


How does one subtly turn off a power station?

National Grid plc has minute-by-minute graphs. It can see you taking the piss, and its friends in Ofgem are on speed-dial.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-08/Final%2...


I meant more subtle market/price manipulation.


They aren't deliberately turning power stations off. We have a renewable system so when those sources aren't generating then we need gas.

All the BBG article proved is the inherent problems with the system that we have. Rather than anyone being blamed for creating that system, rather than anyone being blamed for regulating that system, we get the same politically-motivated nonsense about "evil companies"...this is why we have high electricity costs. There is literally zero political incentive to lower them and, as we have seen, very high political gains from proposing fictional solutions. Guess what? We are still going to be in the exact same place in a few years because we haven't changed the thing causing this (over-reliance on renewables).




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