Embattled water supplier promises to invest up to £3bn more over the next five years
Thames Water could raise bills to as much as £627 a year to pay to fix its leaky network, after promising to invest up to £3bn more over the next five years.
The embattled water supplier said on Monday that it had updated its spending plans for 2025 to 2030 after discussions with the industry regulator, Ofwat.
Continue reading...Fall to 14.4p comes after shareholders said they were unwilling to inject further funds
A bond issued by Thames Water’s parent company has fallen to record lows as the embattled company scrambles to secure its future, and the government signalled it is “ready to step in if necessary”.
The £400m bond, issued by the water supplier’s parent company, Kemble, has slumped to only 14.4p after shareholders indicated that they were unwilling to inject further funds into the heavily indebted utility company.
Continue reading...Crunch talks expected after investors refuse to secure short-term cashflow and parent company due to repay £190m loan
Thames Water has assembled a team of City experts to lead urgent restructuring talks this week amid fears that its parent company may collapse by the end of the month.
The crunch talks are expected to take place days after Thames Water’s investors signalled they would not put further funds into the company to secure its short-term cashflow, according to a source.
Continue reading...Despite a 12.3% cut in April’s energy price cap, there is an important fixed element in your bill that is rising again
“Great news! Your unit rates are going down.” E.ON’s letter to customers starts with glad tidings – but, as it soon admits, there is an element of their bills that is set to go up in most parts of the country.
Despite a headline cut of 12.3% in April’s energy price cap, yet again standing charges are rising. In E.ON’s case, on its Next Flex tariff, electricity charges are due to rise from 62.205p to 67.9041p – an increase of just over 9% – while for gas, charges go up from 29.595p to 31.894p (up almost 8%).
Continue reading...Decision raises concerns about financial future of UK’s biggest water firm and increases prospect of nationalisation
Investors at Thames Water have pulled the plug on £500m of emergency funding, raising concerns about the financial future of the country’s largest water company and increasing the prospect of nationalisation.
The beleaguered utilities company announced this morning that its shareholders had refused to provide the first tranche of £750m funding set to secure its short-term cashflow, after the company had failed to meet certain conditions.
Continue reading...Details of Chris O’Shea’s ballooning package emerge in Centrica’s annual report after company reports bumper profits
The boss of the British Gas owner, Centrica, has seen his earnings nearly double to £8.2m, despite having admitted that his smaller pay packet the previous year was “impossible to justify”.
Chris O’Shea earned a basic salary of £903,000, which was topped up by cash and share bonuses worth an extra £7.3m.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Sarah Olney to press in parliament for details of scheme being drawn up in event of supplier’s collapse
Ministers must come clean on the secret details of an emergency plan for a taxpayer bailout in the event of Thames Water collapsing, a Liberal Democrat MP has said.
Sarah Olney will press in parliament this week for details of a behind-the-scenes rescue operation being drawn up for the biggest privatised water company in England. Olney said keeping the details of the contingency plan secret amounted to a cover-up.
Continue reading...Price Promise tariff gives discount on current cap and guarantees to be at least £1 per fuel under April one
British Gas has launched a fixed-rate gas and electricity deal that offers a 12% saving over most existing price-capped tariffs, adding a new choice to the hard-to-navigate home energy market.
For the past two winters, consumers have largely been spared having to seek out the cheapest deal, because, in almost all cases, it was their supplier’s price cap-protected standard tariff.
Continue reading...Government adviser says water and telecoms privatisation is to blame for disfiguring streets with concrete slabs
The government must increase fines on utility companies that dig up pavements for roadworks, then pour in concrete rather than fixing the mess, a government adviser has said.
Telecoms and water companies are creating “street scars” in a “wasteful process” that is marring British high streets, Nicholas Boys Smith, who chairs the Office for Place in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has said in a report.
Continue reading...It looks as if USS simply overpaid and underestimated the effort and catch-up investment required
“We continue to view Thames Water as a long-term investment,” said the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the £75bn pension fund for UK academics, as it wrote down the value of its stake in the Thames’ parent by nearly two-thirds, or almost £600m. Top marks for cheerfulness, but it’s a line that recalls the old joke about the definition of a long-term investment: a short-term investment gone wrong.
USS and Canadian pension fund Omers, the other late arrival on Thames’ register in 2017 (they replaced the departing Macquarie and its co-travellers), surely cannot have imagined that the long term would stretch quite so far over the horizon. As USS says, it’s taken no dividends so far, and the current business plan imagines no income for shareholders until 2030 at the earliest. That’s a near-eternity in investment terms for utility assets, which are supposedly prized for their ability to generate steady cash.
Continue reading...Extra cash values firm at nearly $8bn, as it says it has greater share of home electricity market than British Gas
Octopus Energy has raised $800m (£630m) from its shareholders in a move that values the company at nearly $8bn, weeks after it became Britain’s biggest power supplier.
Its existing investors, which include Japan’s Tokyo Gas and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, have ploughed in extra cash as the value of the utility company surged by 60% since its last fundraising round two years ago.
Continue reading...Former British Gas executive tasked with leading turnaround in face of debts and controversy over sewage
Thames Water has appointed a former British Gas executive as its new boss with a pay package of up to £2.3m a year and tasked with leading a crucial turnaround as it faces mounting debts and controversy over dumping sewage in Britain’s waterways.
Chris Weston replaces Sarah Bentley, who resigned with immediate effect in June amid a backlash over the firm’s poor environmental track record. Weston will take up the role on 8 January.
Continue reading...Cost of debt rises for firm that left thousands of customers without running water in summer
South East Water, which left thousands of customers without running water this summer, has paid out dividends of £2.25m over six months while overseeing increased losses of £18.1m before tax.
The water company, which serves customers in Kent, Sussex, Berkshire and Surrey, made the payout to shareholders despite facing huge rises in the costs of its £1.4bn debt mountain, its half-year report showed on Thursday. In the six months to 30 September, the cost of serving the debt rose by £7.4m to £54.8m, as inflation and higher interest rates bit.
Continue reading...Opposition vows to tackle rural connection delays to the grid while Conservatives call for offshore network to preserve landscapes
Labour is promising to “rewire Britain”, making its case to the UK’s rural communities that it will connect farmers and businesses to the National Grid at record-breaking speed.
The pledge comes as Rishi Sunak faces a battle over electricity pylons with the trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and former ministers urging him to pull the plug on crucial grid infrastructure.
Continue reading...First of 277 turbines goes into operation at site that will produce enough energy for 6m homes a year
The first turbine to be completed in a project to build the world’s largest offshore windfarm, in the North Sea, has begun powering British homes and businesses.
Developers confirmed on Monday that Dogger Bank, which sits 70 nautical miles off the coast of Yorkshire, started producing power over the weekend as the first of 277 turbines was connected to the electricity grid.
Continue reading...Traders close shops, electricity bills are set alight and utility firm staff are attacked as anger rises over living costs and political strife
Protests against rising electricity and petrol prices have rocked Pakistan over the past week, with thousands taking to city streets and setting their electricity bills alight.
The cost of electricity has doubled in the last three months to about 50 rupees (12p) a kilowatt. Petrol prices have shot up from 262 rupees a litre in June to 305 rupees this month.
Continue reading...Hawaiian Electric Co wires were seen uncovered as company’s own documents call its wooden poles a ‘serious public hazard’
In the first moments of the Maui fires, when high winds brought down power poles, slapping electrified wires to the dry grass below, there was a reason the flames erupted all at once in long, neat rows – those wires were bare, uninsulated metal that could spark on contact.
Videos and images analyzed by the Associated Press confirmed those wires were among miles of line that Hawaiian Electric Co left naked to the weather and often-thick foliage, despite a recent push by utilities in other wildfire- and hurricane-prone areas to cover up their lines or bury them.
Continue reading...Company breached three-year rolling limit on abstraction licence at Fylde aquifer in 2018
United Utilities has been fined £800,000 after illegally abstracting 22bn litres of water in Lancashire, causing damage to an important aquifer that will take years to recover.
The illegal removal of water from the Fylde aquifer, which happened during a period of dry weather in 2018, is likely to have negatively affected river flows.
Continue reading...Australian investment bank funds troubled UK utility’s overhaul of pipes and sewage works
The Australian infrastructure investor Macquarie has confirmed it will inject a further £550m into the UK’s Southern Water in an attempt to turn around the troubled company.
The funds are intended to help Southern Water, which supplies Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, to overhaul its leaky pipes and faulty sewage works.
Continue reading...ScottishPower expects Hagshaw Hill to produce five times as much energy with half the turbines by early 2025
One of Britain’s oldest onshore windfarms will soon be “repowered” so it can generate five times as much green electricity as it did in 1995 – with almost half as many turbines.
The owner of the Hagshaw Hill windfarm, ScottishPower, began dismantling 26 turbines on its site in rural South Lanarkshire on Wednesday.
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