The farce continues ...

Today I get another letter from Energy Australia, this one headed: "We've Credited Your Account" and goes on to say "Your bill was calculated using incomplete information. As a result, we unfortunately overcharged you. Please pay the Amount Due by the due date."

Amount Due: $6.66

So, yesterday they said they undercharged me and issued a credit. Today they say they have overcharged me and issued a debit.

I'm reminded of that saying about having lunatics in charge of the asylum.

Here in New Jersey USA I occasionally get telemarketing calls from someone wanting me to switch power companies. I ask them "When will you be stringing power cables down my street?" They say, oh Pubic Service (the real power company around here) will provide the power and read the meter. "We get our power from green sources". I ask "How do you keep the electricity from dirty sources out of my wires?" (as I know all generated power gets merged together on the power grid network). They say "All we do is send you a bill". Sounds like a scam to me... I'm paying around 17 cents a kilowatt hour, which is expensive, some places in the USA can be as low as 8 cents.

I don't know... are you sure it's Pubic?


Anyway your electricity is very cheap, don't complain.

I'm paying almost 30c / kW, plus $1 a day just to have it connected.

Even allowing for inflation, I remember a time when our electricity was cheaper than 17c. That was back in the days before our governments started subsidising silly solar and wind projects that don't have a 24 hour duty cycle and allowing the private owners of coal-fired power stations to allow those assets to literally rot to pieces.

I checked out Momentum. Their residential rate would save me about $50 per quarter but their commercial rate is more than twice what I am paying EA.

I keep a database of my bills. Before 2000, there were 2 charges depending on your consumption, and no service charge.

That changed in 2001, the 2 charges became 1, and the service charge being split off (and growing into a monster).

Here's the prices from then to now (cents per kilowatthour) for ordinary domestic power:
2001 (April to June) - 10.49
2001 July - 10.63
2002 July - 10.9
2003 July - 11.2
2004 July - 11.78
2005 July - 11.94
2006 July - 12.34
2007 July - 13.33
2008 July - 14.62
2009 July - 17.75
2010 July - 18.93
2011 July - 21.85
2012 July - 24.25
2013 July - 24.66
2014 July - 21.94 (cheaper because carbon tax was removed)
2015 July - 21.43
2016 July - 23.43
2017 July - 27.09 - this is still the current price. It looks more now (29.8), because GST is now included, instead of being a separate item.

Here's the service charge over the same period (cents per day regardless of power used):
2001 (April to June) - 16.42
2001 July - 19.71
2002 July - 23.47
2003 July - 26.2
2004 July - 30
2005 July - 35.34
2006 July - 37.34
2007 July - 39.87
2008 July - 39.98
2009 July - 48
2010 July - 52
2011 July - 59.85
2012 July - 69.14
2013 July - 69.84
2014 July - 68.83 (cheaper because carbon tax was removed)
2015 July - 70.89
2016 July - 78.5
2017 July - 82.89 - this is still the current price. It looks more now (91.18), because of the same GST reason as above.

Being a Farm Everything financial is recorded. I have "MYOB" back into the nineties, so that has backed up records to its start & I there is some in "Quicken".

. I like the gall & hypocrisy of some who claim to be Australian & you need to contact Mumbai. Manilla etc. & need to speak another language. How that is supporting Australian jobs I don't know. Telstra would have the worst WEB & phone support: Can't see why they have not won a five star "Canstar" award for bad.

I do like comic relief when you see the incompetence & greed with many of these companies. "Green energy" : I always see a blue plasma flow & I am not colour blind.

Privatisation making things cheaper was just another con. If you sell the Farm you have nothing left to sell and they're selling it.

QUOTE: If you sell the Farm you have nothing left to sell and they're selling it.

Its a bit like this government telling the farmers if they need assistance after 4 years they ought to consider selling. Wow what a incompetant remark!

The term relating to the Farm is based on the fact that if you sell the Farm; in the case of our Government normally overseas ; You no longer own it. Pretty much as noted.

However, once you personally, or the government have sold it and fritted the money away; You have nothing else to sell and therefore end up broke.

Einstein said we would breed a generations of Morons & I think we have reached that point.

I could not believe recently:....

In the face of mass sackings in the cereal processing mills, because there is no grain to process due to there literally being virtually none harvested in the last few years, due to drought: In being told that there was going to be a shortage of breakfast cereal... This turkey reasoned the answer was to open more independent supermarkets?

Obviously a brain washing that only took a light rinse.

Re energy suppliers, there must be something floating about in the Spring air other than pollen.

Here in Canberra the only option for years was ACTEWAGL which was part ACT Govt owned in partnership with AGL. In the last couple of years other providers have come in and after 27 years I switched to Origin Energy nine months ago for both electricity and gas. It was not a huge saving but definitely cheaper even allowing for the supply charge.

Yesterday a bloke from ACTEWAGL turned up at the front door to tell me about the new cheaper rates I could have if I switched back to them. I told him that I had been a customer for 27 years and asked why I had not been offered cheaper rates when I WAS a customer. He couldn't answer that one and did not understand that what he was effectively saying was that ACTEWAGL had been overcharging while they had a captive market. Now that they were losing customers they were trying to use discounts to win back market share. However they had lost the confidence of their customers and could not be trusted. He still did not get the point and argued that Origin would be just as bad. (Probably correct on that point but for the moment it is cheaper.) So I told him to report back what I had said to his marketing managers but I doubt they would understand the concept of 'trust' given that his pitch assumed that I was stupid and greedy.

However as mentioned previously the electrons and gas molecules still travel along the same wires and pipes so having a 'choice' of suppliers is actually negating economies of scale hence the steadily rising supply charge.

I liked the old 'separation of powers' arrangement that NSW used to have. The NSW Government set the prices. Elcom (Electricity Commission of NSW) generated the power and transmitted it over the HV grid. County Councils, which were wholly owned by local governments took care of distribution from 66kV downwards, right to our door and billed us quarterly.

Let's face it - no-one enjoys paying bills but back in that regulated but well structured environment the price was comparatively low and when storms hit and brought wires down there was always plenty of staff available to put things right licketty split.

From the time that huge power stations like Bayswater and Eraring came online, power shedding and shortages were never an issue.

Fast forward to now - we have this myriad of government and semi-government regulators (read: fat cats sitting on their arses sending e-mails to each other all day, every day) and various public relations crowds telling us of the virtues of "renewable" energy when there is no such thing as renewable energy, it is intermittent energy, which dirties the supply with spikes, surges and brownouts almost continually.

What's more, we have the double edged sword of closures of coal-fired power stations over the last fifteen years which has removed the one single thing that is capable of absorbing the instability created by energy supplies switching in and out of the grid all the time - heavy inertia. This instability cannot be adequately absorbed by spike and surge suppression equipment.

I see it at work quite often. Every time our building is hit we lose a handful of various pieces of equipment and it costs us money - big money - to keep replacing it.

Still, we keep getting told by the Left and certain elements of the Right that this is the future. If so, the believers in it should pay for everything that goes wrong as a result.

There is no reticulated gas here at the moment, however, one has to be careful with cheap rates. What looks cheap may be a Pig in a Poke.

They may give a cheaper rate on the actual power but jack up The "Service to Property Charge". Rarely will they tell you that & they still win.

Threatening to leave does work but, it is as pointed out, if they have been screwing you for all they can get, when they send an email other than no reply, you hit them about the reduction in the charges, if offered.

One of the tactics I have used on Telstra (Profit before People) is to deliberately give their feedback survey, an honest mark, in my case not above three, depending on the irrelevance of the silly loaded question. That way they would get back to you & you could have another go at them.

Bearing in mind that this is a Farm, Lumo is charging me $1.520 per day for their "Service to Property" charge.

Good point regarding contracts. Governments are doing something with forcing retailers to speak English in their contracts, product disclosure statements, terms and conditions, etc. But does it go far enough? The jury is probably still out on that one.

In the past, retail contracts have been so onerous that a lot of people who just want cheap electricity and someone in Australia to talk to if they need help with something end up so muddled and confused that they give up and get relatives to sign contracts for them.

Here's a bit of a reminder to the electricity and gas retailers - you are selling electricity and gas, not a parts and service inventory for a Saturn V rocket!

Update, the bill came in and it was 73 dollars this is for one month so that's 219 dollars for 3 months , pete