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Power bills soar - Drax investors get £326m

Oscar Beard | 13.09.2006 12:28 | Climate Camp 2006 | Climate Chaos | Ecology | World

Reported in yesterday's Evening Standard, 12/9/06.

Investors in the Drax power station are to get a £326m windfall as customers recieve massive rises in fuel costs.

Drax chairman Gordon Horsfield also recieved over £4 million in a cheque on top of the £50m he has already made from the company.

What do the customers get? Energy bills that have doubled to more than £1000 a year. Again, yet another case of rich-richer, poor-royally shafted.

Drax's first-half pre-tax profits soar to £317 million, as compared with £13 million the previous year, profit margins increasing to more than 50 percent.

Drax charged £45.70 per megawatt/hour in the first half of this year, at a cost of £17 mw/hr to create the energy and a pollution penalty of £5.80 per mw/hr.

Yesterday the shares in Drax continued to fall by 21p to 852.5p

Oscar Beard
- e-mail: oscarbeard@yahoo.com.mx
- Homepage: http://www.reprogrammingthedesensitised.com

Comments

Hide the following 5 comments

It's enough to turn you into ...

13.09.2006 13:17

... a class struggle anarchist ...

Capitalist owners, directors and shareholders don't you just hate them? - claiming ownership of the earth's resources, selling it back to us at ever higher prices, and destroying the planet to boot. Expropriate the lot of them I say. Destroy the economy. Get rid of money. Revolution! Grrr. Utopia is just around the corner if we act together.

revolutionary anarchist


You forgot to mention...

13.09.2006 15:56

...amalgamating down into one or or only several "choices", lessening the choice of where you go to attain power, thus creating "no choice" in the end, which allows the corporations to increase the prices to whatever the hell they want, under the attitude of "Yeah, what you gonna do about it?"

Of course, if the Proles do get too aggitated just cook up some crisis story - running out of gas, petrol, coal, water - and increase the price accordingly, the Enwrong way of business.

Create the crisis to increase the prices.

Or Thames Water, where this year they created more profit by not fixing leaks, paying the OffWat fine, and then increased water bills becasue there was a water shortage - a water shortage partially created because there were so many damn leaks in the undermaintained pipes.

Clever. £346m profit, £140m fine, end of year tax profits £206.

Just wait till there are no other options than Oyster cards on the London Underground and watch the prices sky-rocket, all the way to the shareholders off-shore bank accounts. The average bod, got work, got travel card to get to work and back...oh, got no money for food, or bills...damn.

Oscar Beard


Thievery

13.09.2006 16:58

Who does the University and the "Union" plan on "giving" my home to after I put my work and care into it?

Your whore, Dan?

Citizen


learn to build your own wind turbines

13.09.2006 18:43

For the mechanically minded one way off the grid is to learn how to build your own electricity generation. For example, Hugh Piggot was commissioned to design a wind turbine for use in international development work by the Intermediate Technology Development Group. The plans are downloadable from the internet at his website: www.scoraigwind.co.uk.

A Hugh Piggot wind turbine provided a lot of the energy for the Climate Camp itself. It is probably not a solution for those who live in the centre of British cities, but for others it makes a lot of sense.

whatever way you choose to tackle centralised power and the resultant climate catastrophe keep the faith.

Reclaim Power!

pete


from 1066 to Drax

14.09.2006 12:23

Nice to see the ES on the ball though this was reported in other papers ( including the increasingly neoliberal Grauniad ) and on the web in May!

As another unfortunate on a key meter it noticed at the time that they had also sold a substantial ammount of next years electric output to the greedy Centrica ( tell Sid if he's got shares I'm going to mug him the theiving bastard! ) who were getting some record profits.

It still need reiterating about Drax suing the EU for ( along with 4 other UK power companies ) 20 million tonnes of carbon credits. Now does that figure sound familiar? Yep, Drax 'adding value' to the carbon pool in terms of 20m tonnes of emissions. These emissions can be of course offset by some dodgy colonialist tree/dam/smelting etc etc. programme.

A good way to find out what is going on is to visit the business library and check trade journals ( they like to boast to each other ) or just the business pages/papers in general and join the dots.

It is a shame people in this country cannot get off their arses and still are job obsessed whatever the cost. We are unsustainable and are merely a means of legitimising the Square Mile Robbers still practising colonial war and theft. Smashing up Upper Thames Street, brickin up the traders - next time shut the whole lot down and maybe we could start getting somewhere ( though land and food needs to be sorted if we are goijng to get through this )

What is needed is a combination of permaculture and insurrection. cannot have one without the other as we depend on the status quo as having had our land taken from us through invasions and legislation. it makes me laugh that on Diggers day that you have banners waving from the Orwellian/Cromwellian Labour party ( resources war, arms trade, fat union bosses licking IMF/WB/WTO lover GB's arse ( don't let the spin of arguments fool you ) / dodgy employment statistics, police state ).

That is what we get from a minority pushing their elected representatives and ( don't forget your bent councillors also ) - I will elaborate on this but my point is anyone voting for these bastards or support them in any way you are guilty - It's a mandate for bombing children anyone - if you voted for these fuckers then you may as well have pulled the trigger/dropped the cluster bomb yourself. reform Labour - you're avin a laff. i

If you want a union perhaps you should form your own IWW and fuck the other bastards who give moiney to these cunts. ( The RMT ain't too bad though - though i could never be as lucky as to get a job on the railways or affored to use their trains!!!!!!) Jobs vs climate change and resources war/ posatmodern colonialism. englan is still a bitch. Rant over.


poison the fat cats milk


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