We’ve all felt the pain of crippling increases in our energy bills. And this week, it was the turn of the water companies to announce that they were hiking up their prices – those rises due to come in April will average around 3.5 per cent in England and Wales.
So why are we paying more for our water?
Talk to the water companies and they will tell you they are having to invest billions of pounds in improvements. But these are privately-owned monopolies, which have little incentive to invest quickly in the most innovative solutions.
Take for example , water leakages. Every day in the UK, 3.4 billion litres of water leaks from the system, almost a quarter of the entire supply. Yet most water companies will not required to cut leaks between now and 2015, despite the UK experiencing the worst drought last year in 25 years.
And its not as if we don’t have British-made technology to tackle this problem easily and cost-effectively. i2O Water is a Southampton-based company that has developed an ‘intelligent’ water control solution that can reduce water leakages by as much as 30 per cent. The company has won a number awards including last weeks Rushlight Award and is literally stopping cities around the world from running out of water. But in the UK, most of the water companies are being painstakingly slow about the rate at which they are investing in the clean technology. And in the words of i2O’s ceo Adam Kingdon, this is despite the cost of deployment being a “very small part of their overall budgets” and payback in under a year.
The murky world of the energy wholesale market
For the energy companies, it’s a little more complicated as to why energy bills are going up. There is a the massive cost of replacing our ageing energy infrastructure to a cleaner, greener one – estimated by the Government to be around £110 billion over the next 10 years. But we are also exposed to a volatile wholesale gas market. And what a murky world that is. This week’s story by the Guardian about how UK bill payers are being exploited by a system where we can end up paying more for the gas we import than the gas we export, should have us all sitting up and taking notice.
No doubt there is an innovative technology out there that could and should be being deployed faster to tackle rising energy bill prices, too, although commercial self-interest looks to be the main issue to tackle when it comes to the wholesale gas market.
So what can we do about it?
Clearly there is a role for the regulators here. But as consumers we should also be putting pressure on our utility companies to take action – social media is a powerful force for change, and one not even the energy and water companies can afford to ignore.
We need to put more pressure on our politicians. The Government’s water bill lacks ambition and a sense of urgency. Meanwhile, Ministers continue to send out mixed messages to the investment community about the Government’s commitment to green energy, despite its own evidence that the majority of the UK population backs renewables.
And we can take even more direct action to meet the challenges we face today. Investing our money in a cleaner, greener energy and water innovations directly really is possible now. Crowdfunding platforms, such as Abundance Generation and the soon to launch Crowdmission, have put sustainability and the green economy at the centre of their values. There is a of course a risk to these types of investments, and everyone should go in with their eyes open, but leaving it all in the hands of our utility companies seems a far riskier proposition these days.
