Water tanks and solar should have been encouraged and subsidised by Government 20 years ago [they were paid by us taxpayers and ratepayers] for their intelligence vision and legislation.

Selling out to overseas companies has not brought sufficient competition to lower prices. It has done the reverse AND created constant fraudulent practices.

Team...'foooooCUS' please... Yabby.. your second post was useful..some actual figures... *GOOD BOY*

Now.. I'ts as simple as this. When you form into a solidarity bloc, you have bargaining power.

ALL GO... they lose $12 million (approx)
All STAY..they are $12 Mil better off on the bottom line.

NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN.
You ask for 5% DISCOUNT for your 10k members... =$600,000 LESS INCOME.

Compare... (You are the CEO) "Lose $12,000,000 ...or... lose $600,000"

Is there a choice?

MIKK... are you willing to stand with me outside the offices of the CBA and hold up a sign like "GREEDY CAPITALIST PIG" with a picture of Norris on it ? When u r READY and in Melbourne..lemme know and we'll go together.

WAGES and CONDITIONS... sorry mate.. that ship sailed and the horse on it jumped into the sea. I'm open to 'inflation' based improvements but not more at THIS stage.

More Productivity=Better pay. Anything more is 'theft'.

W and C will just drive us into financial oblivion more than we are now.

YABBY.. my bill is because of a 2kw fan heater which I need on just about 14hrs a day during the cooooollllllld days.

Can someone give some consideration to:

a) Setup costs
b) Type of network structure
c) Hidden/unexpected costs

please. i.e... constructively criticize the idea.

Negotiations cost money.
Re-negotiations cost money.
Monitoring of the customer block to ensure the deal is honoured costs money.
Disputing the utility companies costs money.

I predict that the money saved in bills would be spent on the protection of the customer block rights.

*The other way around; 93c in the dollar retained for themselves and shareholders*

Unique, that would be wonderful, for Origin is of course an ASX
company, largely owned by Australian workers. My super fund too
owns some shares in it. Sadly your understanding of their
financials is wrong, for of course being a public company, figures
are published and audited. If they lied, they would go to jail.

What is amazing however, is that you think that companies barely
have costs and seemingly hardly pay wages. Perhaps finance is
not your strong point. Fair enough.

*my bill is because of a 2kw fan heater which I need on just about 14hrs a day during the cooooollllllld days*

Fair enough Boaz, at 20c/kwH thats 20 bucks a week, just for that
fan heater.

The thing is, if we benchmark Australian energy prices per unit,
they are not unreasonable. In Denmark they pay 42c, Germany 30c,
Italy 37c, Philippines 28c, Tonga 45c. France is cheaper, but
they use nuclear power.

The other thing which makes our power expensive, given that we use
coal, is not the coal, but the distribution lines. Its a large
country, with lots of poles, they all need maintaining and that
ain't cheap, not with our labour costs and all that overtime paid,
every time there is a storm.

Amazing how energy costs have increased by more than 40% under federal labor, and GHG emissions have also increased.

Thanx George J, SM and Yabby

I think George has an important point in that such a bloc would need a fair bit of housekeeping.

The idea would be just to obtain an "authorization to negotiate/change provider" from each customer.

The paperwork is all on the Provider's then. I hate to think was 10,000 'changes of provider' in one day would do to the administrative kernel of Origin or TRU?

If they make 7c in the dollar 'profit' is that AFTER tax or before, and that would be AFTER the outrageously obcene CEO and senior exec paypackets.

The COST of our elec is projected to go UP UP and AWAY over the next few years... why? There are many *commercial* reasons they will cite but it all boils down to "improving share price and dividends for shareholders and performance bonuses for bosses"

These things are 'given' and being a commercial organization they must be subjected to TRUE commercial pressure in the form of a BLOC of customers who will simply not take "no...steady as we go now" as an answer.

QUESTIONs....

1/ What might an Elec provider 'do' to fight this?
2/ How would a Consumer Bloc fight back against that?
3/ Did you all know that Box Hill council used to BULK PURCHASE elec on behalf of rate payers and it gave a much cheaper price :)