One in seven Scots find energy bills unaffordable amid warnings over cost of living crisis.

[NNadir]

The article is here: One in seven Scots find energy bills unaffordable amid warnings over cost of living crisis.

Excerpts:

Around 640,000 people in Scotland – about one in seven - find their energy bills unaffordable as a result of low incomes, new analysis has found, amid warnings that families could be £1,200 a year worse off.

The study, from Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS), found that 36 per cent of adults in Scotland find their energy bills unaffordable. Of these people 40 per cent cite low incomes as a reason. Twelve per cent say inconsistent incomes make it difficult to afford to pay or their utilities.

This comes as the SNP warned that Boris Johnson is "leaving millions of families in the cold" amid the cost of living crisis, which is expected to leave families £1,200 worse off from April...

...CAS fair markets policy officer Michael O’Brien said that pre-pandemic, a quarter of Scottish households were already living in fuel poverty.

He said: “While energy bills have soared in recent months, it’s important to understand that households on low incomes were struggling with their energy costs beforehand. With prices in the shops rising and a substantial increase to the energy price cap expected in April, the coming weeks and months could be very challenging for consumers on low incomes...

The article seems not to be behind a paywall.

Scotland, according to what I've read here, is a so called "renewable energy" paradise with lots of wind turbines, but, nevertheless, an energy price crisis.

Right now, (Accessed 11:27 pm EST (US), 01/10/2022) the UK, which has a carbon dioxide intensity of 233 g CO2/kwh, as compared to 91 g CO2/kwh in France, (which is high for France). https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB The UK electricity supply's largest fuel, dangerous natural gas, is providing 34.99% of electricity, followed by wind, producing 25.47% of electricity in that country, with wind running at 30.23% capacity utilization. Unfortunately for Europe, Germany's 64 GW wind infrastructure is running at 6.27% capacity utilization, actually producing 4.3 GW of electricity with all the wind turbines spread all over Germany producing as much electricity as four small buildings containing nuclear reactors could produce reliably. Germany's last three reactors are producing 4.01 GW of electricity as of this writing.

So the Scots have to pay higher prices for dangerous natural gas generated electricity, although the Germans are trying to keep costs down by burning a shit load of coal, 25.8 GW of it as of this writing..

The so called "energy transition" which is less transition than more of the same with a huge dollop of cute but otherwise ridiculous redundancy thrown in for fun, is doing just great, isn't it?

Let's all cheer for it.

The Scottish government apparently likes the German energy policy however, irrespective of how it affects poor people.

They couldn't care less about poverty in Scotland apparently. One defining feature of poverty throughout the world is a lack of access to energy.

Two large nuclear reactors, beautiful AGCRs, recently shut in Scotland after almost 5 decades of operation. The Scots have no intention of replacing them.

[Finishline42]

1. Similar to our situation in the US

According to Google...

In the last year, about 20% of Americans struggled to pay their energy bill in full at least once, according to a study by Help Advisor. At the same time, 18% kept their house at a temperature that was either unhealthy or unsafe. Even more people went without necessities to make sure they could afford their utilities.