Quote:
Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
The infrastructure costs remain regardless of the fuel cost. If fuel prices plummeted the owners would still need to keep spending and material costs still could rise. Maybe a cap on the SC paid so the companies get enough and the customers don't get hit quite so hard.
I guess it comes down to knowing who owns what and where the money goes. And would people in some areas need to pay more SC if the infrastructure to supply them is "more expensive". (e.g. remote farm may have an almost exclusive "pipe" that could cost more than a house on a street with more shared infrastructure.)
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Customers connected to certain distribution networks do indeed pay more. Even though suppliers muck about with the standing charge you’ll notice two customers on the same tariff with the same supplier in different parts of the country will pay different rates. SSE’s network in northern Scotland is the most expensive of the lot (hundreds of miles of exposed cable with very few customers to pay for it). SP Manweb’s Merseyside and North Wales network is likewise stretched thin in North Wales, although counter-intuitively it’s also relatively expensive in Liverpool because the original electricity distribution network there was somewhat over-designed. It’s practically bomb-proof but correspondingly pricey to maintain.
It’s the distribution network operator that levies these charges but the domestic suppliers pass them on.