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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, they capped the price of energy per kWh. So they bailed out everyone, rich, poor and middle alike. And the more energy you used, the more support you got. So richer and more wasteful households got the MOST support.

Saying "but the poor" while throwing money at the rich is pretty self-contradictory IMHO. If they'd at least made cash payments, even if it was the same per household, it would at least have incentivised people not to waste energy. But no, it specifically rewarded people for increasing their consumption.

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This is partially a consequence of the bonkers way in which electricity is priced in the UK: it's costed based off of fuel prices rather than the cost per unit to produce the power in question. This leads to situations where the UK might have plenty of electricity being produced by means other than natural gas (such as renewables), but it's still all costed as if it were produced by natural gas.

And yes, some kind of flat cash payment that advantaged poorer people would've been better. And much as I loathe the Tories, I doubt they took the route they did because they wanted to give money to the rich in this case, or even encourage electricity usage growth. Assume incompetence before malice: they needed to do something to staunch the flow, and a price cap per unit was something they could do there and then without engaging extra bureaucracy, which a cash payment would've required.

> So richer and more wasteful households got the MOST support.

I do agree the implementation of the scheme was very poor.....

....the reasons for which are down to our current governments unfortunate mix of poor competence and fruity ideology (thank $Deity Liss Truss wasn't around for too long!)

The energy cap was already in place in the UK. It contributed to the problems as the price of gas spiked.

It's a bad policy, but it's from the same government that paid people to eat out at restaurants during a viral pandemic, rather than a specific response to the war.

I agree that the incentives were off on paper

But is there any evidence that's been the case, that people have increased their consumption?

Anecdotally, I can't think of anyone I know that hasn't actively reduced their usage

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