British energy firms fear collapse as Europe’s gas crisis sees prices surge 250%

Published

3 years ago

September 20, 2021

admin

Aman Sharma | Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s energy industry could be headed for a significant shakeup, industry insiders have warned, as countries all over Europe grapple with an unprecedented crisis in the power sector.

Wholesale gas prices have spiked across the region, with the U.K. being hit particularly hard.

The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark for natural gas trading, gained on Monday to trade at 73.150 euros ($85.69) per megawatt-hour, hovering close to the record high seen last week.

Since January, the contract has risen more than 250%.

In the U.K., day-ahead energy prices for Monday reached an average of 291.18 euros per megawatt-hour, according to energy analysis firm LCP Enact. However, the maximum price for the U.K. on Monday could be as high as 1,083.78 euros per megawatt-hour, LCP Enact’s analysis showed.

Impact for energy firms

Robert Buckley, head of relationships and development at Cornwall Insight, told CNBC that the crisis was being caused by a “cocktail of pretty potent things” that were outside of suppliers’ control.

These included strong competition for natural gas deliveries between Europe and Asia, some outages at U.S. production facilities and a tightening of EU carbon market rules, as well as various other factors.

“All suppliers will be finding it very tough at the moment,” Buckley said. “Some of them are bigger and more resilient than others. But scale doesn’t equal automatically resilience.”

He added that “it looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better” in terms of suppliers leaving the British electricity and gas market.

“[Suppliers are] caught between this rapture of the rising energy price wholesale market and the default tariff cap, and depending on who you who you believe, this is anywhere up to £200, £250 below what a market related cost would be at the moment, so that’s 20% of the total bill,” he said, referring to a cap on consumer energy prices in Britain. “That’s -20% of gross margins. Very few [companies] can sustain that for any length of time.”

Meanwhile, Bill Bullen, founder of U.K. supplier Utilita Energy, warned that surging wholesale prices would inevitably lead to more insolvencies in the energy sector.

“We’re heading back to an oligopoly at this rate and going backwards,” he said in an email Monday.

According to a report from Cornwall Insight, in the fourth quarter of 2010, the six largest energy firms supplied 99.5% of the domestic energy market in the U.K. By the second quarter of 2021, that figure had fallen to 69.1%.

“I wonder how it will look at the end of Q3 2021,” Bullen said.

Start-up Bulb, the country’s sixth-largest supplier, is seeking a bailout, while four smaller competitors recently ceased trading, the BBC reported.

According to industry body OGUK, wholesale energy prices have surged with a 70% rise since August alone. “OGUK predicts that UK North Sea output will roughly halve by 2027 unless new fields are opened, making the U.K. even more reliant on imports,” Will Webster, the organization’s energy policy manager, told CNBC via email.

A spokesperson for British energy regulator Ofgem told CNBC in an emailed statement. “This is a global issue … Ofgem is working closely with government to manage the wider implications of the global gas price increase.”

Political fallout

Governments are keen to take action to stop the crisis hitting consumers too hard.

The British government is considering bailout loans for energy suppliers, according to local media reports. Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng met with British energy companies on Monday, in what he said was an effort to “ensure that any energy supplier failures cause the least amount of disruption for consumers.”

Seeking to reassure the public on Sunday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the pricing crisis as “temporary,” Bloomberg reported.

The U.K. has limits on how much suppliers are able to charge consumers for energy, with price caps reviewed by the government every six months.

In a note on Monday, Eurasia Group warned the continent’s soaring energy prices were also beginning to have political ramifications across the wider region.

Spain’s government released a decree this week to cap retail energy prices. Eurasia analysts speculated that if more EU member states imitate Spain, prioritizing cheap energy above the green transition, the EU’s credibility as a climate leader could be damaged.

“If Madrid’s actions find imitators across the EU this winter, the bloc’s efforts to push for more ambitious climate action at the upcoming global talks in November may suffer,” they said in Monday’s note.

Environment

Cybertruck backlog runs out, Model S gets stuck, GM hits a sales milestone

Published

8 hours ago

November 5, 2024

admin

Cybertruck backlog runs out, Model S gets stuck, GM hits a sales milestone

On today’s episode of Quick Charge, Tesla’s Cybertruck is now available in Canada – and, like in the US, there’s no waiting! Plus, we’ve got an “actually” smart summon Tesla that’s actually stuck, GM reaches a sales milestone, and we get a brand-new title sponsor!

Today’s episode is the first with our new title sponsor, BLUETTI – a leading provider of portable power stations, solar generators, and energy storage systems.

Source Links

Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonusLucid proves than an EV company can keep its promises while Xiaomi teams up with Chevrolet and Honda to prove – at least conceptually – that records are made to be broken. audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news!

Got news? Let us know!
Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show!

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Environment

This ‘supercharger on wheels’ brings fast charging to you [update]

Published

9 hours ago

November 4, 2024

admin

This 'supercharger on wheels' brings fast charging to you [update]

Mobile car care company Yoshi Mobility launched a DC fast charging EV mobile unit that it likens to “a supercharger on wheels.”

November 4, 2024 update: Yoshi Mobility will only be charging EVs on the side of the road now – it announced today that it’s selling its fleet fueling operation to EZFill Holdings (Nasdaq: EZFL).

It was originally founded as a direct-to-consumer, mobile fueling business in 2016, but now it’s going to focus on mobile EV charging, virtual vehicle inspections for partners like Uber and Turo, and onsite preventative maintenance.

Bryan Frist, Yoshi Mobility’s CEO & cofounder, said, “By spinning off our fuel business and focusing all of our energy on solving hair-on-fire problems that fleet owners face, we are meeting the changing needs of enterprise customers while making the future of transportation safer, cleaner, and more sustainable.”

May 22, 2024: Yoshi Mobility saw that its existing customers needed mobile EV charging in places where infrastructure has yet to be installed, so the Nashville-based company decided to bring the mountain to Moses.

“We recognized a demand among our customers for convenient daily charging, reliable private charging networks, and proper charging infrastructure to support their fleet vehicles as they transition to electric,” said Dan Hunter, Yoshi Mobility’s chief EV officer and cofounder.

The company says its 240 kW mobile DC fast charger, which can turn “any EV” into a mobile charging unit, is the first fully electric mobile charger available. It can provide multiple charges in a single trip but doesn’t detail how they charge the DC fast charger or who manufactured it. (I asked for more details, and they replied that they won’t disclose client names or the manufacturer of its DC fast charger yet.)

Yoshi is launching its mobile charger on two GM BrightDrop Zevo 600s and will introduce additional vehicles throughout 2024. It aims for full commercialization by Q1 2025. (I wonder if the Zevo 600 ever charges itself? Yes, I asked that too.)

Yoshi Mobility says it’s already deployed its EV charging solutions to service “major OEMs, autonomous vehicle companies, and rideshare operators” across the US. Its initial customers are made up of large EV operators managing “hundreds” of light-duty vehicles requiring up to 1 megawatt of energy per day that don’t yet have grid-connected EV chargers. I’ve asked Yoshi for details of who it’s working with, and will update if they share that info.

The company says pricing is based on location and enterprise charging needs. Once under contract for service, the service will be deployed to US-based customers within 10 days.

To date, Yoshi Mobility has raised more than $60 million, with investments from GM Ventures, Bridgestone, ExxonMobil, and Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.

If you’re an electric vehicle owner, charge up your car at home with rooftop solar panels. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing on solar, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –ad*

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Environment

Marqeta shares plunge more than 30% on big forecast miss

Published

10 hours ago

November 4, 2024

admin

Marqeta shares plunge more than 30% on big forecast miss

Marqeta celebrates its initial public offering at the Nasdaq on June 9, 2021.

Source: The Nasdaq

Marqeta shares tumbled more than 30% in extended trading on Monday after the company issued weaker-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter.

Here’s how the company did compared with Wall Street estimates, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Loss per share: 6 cents adjusted vs. a loss of 5 cents expected
Revenue: $128 million vs. $128.1 million expected

While third-quarter results showed a slight disappointment on the top and bottom lines, Marqeta’s forecast for the current period was more concerning.

The payment processing firm said revenue in the fourth quarter will increase 10% to 12% from a year earlier. Analysts were looking for growth of more than 17%, according to LSEG.

Marqeta, which primarily functions as a card-issuing platform, attributed the guidance miss to “heightened scrutiny of the banking environment and specific customer program changes.” The company has been struggling for a while, and its stock is now down more than 80% from its peak in 2021, the year it went public. The stock was down 15% for the year prior to the report.

Total processing volume of $74 billion was up more than 30% from a year earlier. Net revenue and gross profit were up 18% and 24%, respectively.

Marqeta’s digital commerce business sells payment technology designed to detect potential fraud and ensure that money is properly routed. It also issues customized physical cards that look like a credit or debit card that can be used for point-of-sale purchases.

The company has been trying to break into the buy now, pay later business with a recently launched product called Marqeta Flex. The service brings BNPL from lenders such as Affirm or Klarna to any credit card wherever Mastercard and Visa are accepted.

“It’s an orchestration layer, but it’s tied to issuing and processing and disputes and chargebacks,” CEO Simon Khalaf told CNBC at Money2020 in Las Vegas last week. “So it is not actually a Wild West in BNPL. It is actually very well established. And there is a reason why a lot of people are jumping to it.”