Platts: UK utilities under scrutiny as wholesale gas and power falls

UK gas and electricity prices are back in the spotlight after the country’s energy regulator, Ofgem, wrote to the nation’s major energy suppliers asking them to explain why household bills weren’t reacting to falling wholesale markets.

“In a competitive market, I would expect the threat of losing market share to encourage suppliers to pass on sustained reductions in wholesale costs as savings to consumers as soon as possible,” the regulator’s CEO Dermot Nolan wrote in a public letter.

The warm winter at the start of this year has sent wholesale gas prices plummeting, as the market moved into the summer with high storage levels and reduced injection requirements. This compared with a nasty cold spell in March/April of 2013, which had required expensive Continental gas imports to keep the system balanced
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