Please accept my apologies for very limited blogging this morning.
My internet connection appears to be intermittent at best this morning, and often non-existent. I am not sure why but it is most certainly going to disrupt normal patterns of blogging and there is very little that I am likely to be able to do about it at the moment.
Normal services will be resumed, but I do not know when.
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Glad you’re getting a rest – enjoy
The site is still very slow – I might just skip today
Another off-piste reference regarding power supply interruptions.
After losing service over more than two days (twice, not once); I contacted my energy price supplier, who does not supply the actual service; made a complaint, and asked for compensation, since I was paying for a service they failed to deliver, did nothing to restore, offered no help (I didn’t ask because communications were neglible and they had no capacity help anyway), and did not even know there was a problem. I was place on a chat line, and when I raised my compensation request, here was the reply: “The distribution operator for your area (SSE) is not assigned by ourselves, therefore if there is an issue that SSE has had to fix it would have been an issue with them in the first place, this is not an issue caused by [my ‘supplier’] it is an issue by the DNO.” (Distribution Network Operator).
I pointed out I had not contractual relationship with SSE; in law my contract is with my “supplier”. I was then informed I should read OFGEM Regulations.
What an extraordinary, phoney assembly of nonsense our energy supply system has become. Mr Parr appears to be your resident commenter expert in this area, Richard; I would be interested in his comments!
So would I
The moral is buy from SSE, I guess…
Richard,
This is the wrong place, and Mr Parr has unfortunately not responded, or read it; but I would like to persevere.
I have discovered that I have a claim against the network distributor, under the OFGEM regulations. This is absurd, because under conventional sale of goods law, I have no contract with the network operation. At the same time the supplier with which i have a contract to provide a service it not only does not provide, but is incapable of supplying it, can do nothing to fix it, does not even know what is happening; and has no responsibility to render it to me. The whole mess is a farce, but it isn’t funny.
This is a function of a complete phoney market being created out of a natural monopoly; spuriously created by neoliberal obsessed Government and supplied effectively by “suppliers” who have created what seems to me a pure financial market; part banking operation, part hedging opportunity. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the effective and efficient provision of utilities. The “supplier” could be selling anything. they are pure financial market-makers; marginal profit middlemen. They are completely redundant in a utility.
There is a great deal of hostility being directed against the network operators for the failure in service, although they have had to contend with the damage from an exceptional 90mph winter storm; it is their engineers who have the tough job; restoring the service, sometimes rebuilding the power lines from complete destruction, under service pressure.
The “suppliers” are sitting with their feet up (if they are not actually bust, because most of this phoney market are proven to be rotten hedge managers): ‘nothing to do with me, guv’. The ludicrous part of this phoney market is that the Government have created their phoney market on such a scale, that nobody knows who their operator is; when you make a claim you are asked to key in your postcode, so you can find out. The network operators have been left out of the light; no wonder a bunch of engineers are not best at consumer communications in a crisis. Nobody is supposed to know they are there; because when you know how things actually operate, you discover the whole “market” is a phoney operation.
Meanwhile the deeply paranoid Scottish Conservatives are attempting to turn an energy market problem that is the plaything of the Conservative Government Westminster, into the responsibility of the Scottish Government by deflecting attention to the symptoms of the problem, rather than the causes.
The power market is a fake and a failure. The public is being conned.
I agree wholeheartedly
I recorded such sentiments for Channel 4 yesterday
We will have to see if they use them