Andrew Sissons

To repeat: EDF released a forecast today showing the typical bill at £2,200 in January. That would be up nearly £600 since April. www.edfenergy.com/gas-and-elec... That forecast looks maybe a little high, but we keep expecting wholesale gas prices to fall and they keep on rising…

Question from my unreliable memory: have the clocks always changed on Sunday morning? A friend at school didn’t realise the clocks had changed, overslept and then his mum called him in sick out of embarrassment. Did the clocks change on a school night or did they go a whole Sunday not realising?

Catching up with this @katie0martin.ft.com piece on the Budget, which is very good as ever. But I’m still worried that everyone (markets and government) is underplaying the problems energy bills are going to cause in January

And btw the January price cap is all but locked in now. The Ofgem observation window for wholesale prices closes in mid-November; even if wholesale prices were to plummet tomorrow (seems unlikely), there isn’t long enough for them to turn the Jan price cap around much

Catching up with this @katie0martin.ft.com piece on the Budget, which is very good as ever. But I’m still worried that everyone (markets and government) is underplaying the problems energy bills are going to cause in January

And there are two problems exacerbating that: 1. Most gas is used over winter, so the economic impact of this energy shock may be worse than the CPI change alone suggests (afaik CPI weights aren’t seasonally adjusted). In 2022 we still had the post-Covid savings. This time we may be more exposed

Catching up with this @katie0martin.ft.com piece on the Budget, which is very good as ever. But I’m still worried that everyone (markets and government) is underplaying the problems energy bills are going to cause in January

What song lyrics are there where it's genuinely ambiguous what the words are? Esp interested in ones where both possibilities make sense but affect the meaning. Such as... - Bjork, Hyperballad - "safe again" or "same again" repeated in the outro? - Supergrass - Pumping on your stereo or humping?

Pre-Budget bump for my Entropy Britain personal piece. It is a lot about fiscal policy really - overcoming the gradual erosion of the British state will require an injection of energy from somewhere. I think government funding is the obvious place to look acjsissons.medium.com/entropy-brit...

Interesting that Healey is doubling down on Reeves’ PSNFL innovation (which allows more borrowing to invest, provided some quite complex rules are met). This felt like a part of Reeves’ agenda that never lived up to its (significant) promise - will be interesting to see if it can now

This sounds great (without having seen any details) - being able to build business cases for big projects across policy siloes is a good idea. One question I have is about whether the Green Book will also be able to better reflect growth / dynamic benefits, not just static ones…

What I mean by that is: when appraising, say, a transport project, it’s much easier to count the journey time savings (a static benefit) than the potential to grow the economy (a dynamic benefit). Dynamic benefits are harder to quantity, but often much bigger than static ones in the end

Seriously good win for South Africa over Australia. After 2 rain affected days they were in deep trouble at 97-5, but went on to win by an innings - but only just. The Aussies nearly escaped with a draw thanks to the rain www.cricinfo.com/series/austr...

The more you read of this story, the worse it gets

Many people have said it already, but @dsquareddigest.bsky.social’s piece on this theme yesterday was especially good, even by his standards

The more you read of this story, the worse it gets

Is net zero the main reason electricity bills have risen? No, it's still rising gas costs. We ran the numbers on how energy bills have changed in real terms in the last 6 years for Carbon Brief... www.carbonbrief.org/revealed-exp...

So the next time you read someone writing "energy is expensive because of net zero", you will know they almost certainly have not checked the figures

Is net zero the main reason electricity bills have risen? No, it's still rising gas costs. We ran the numbers on how energy bills have changed in real terms in the last 6 years for Carbon Brief... www.carbonbrief.org/revealed-exp...

A few things worth noting from that chart: - Contracts for Difference (CfDs) are adding less to bills now than in 2020 - Network costs (primarily driven by transmission) are the main cost of net zero that *is* showing up - Operating costs are also up a lot, and we think this is mainly due to debt