Email to the Minister of Environment, Climate and Energy, 29 November 2023
Candle and Apple ------------- v Roku Bojan Kumer
Dear Bojan
Email to the Minister of Environment, Climate and Energy, 29 November 2023
Candle and Apple ------------- v Roku Bojan Kumer
Dear Bojan
We all want smaller bills, right?
Wrong. The people sending them don't.
In a purported attempt to smooth out electricity demand, without adding depth to generation, storage, or distribution - and while influencing politics to dream up unnecessary economic and bureaucratic obstacles to feed-in tariffs, thus maintaining revenues for the big energy firms - Slovenia is now introducing an even more complicated electricity tariff scenario.
Due to many uncertainties about this plan from the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Energy, controlling your electricity costs will require mathematical talents well beyond the bit limit of the average customer: 7±2.
To avoid the inevitable ping pong of (in my
case) Elektro Maribor and Energija Plus telling each customer enquiring
about the new electricity tariffs to ask the other one, and so they can find
out the answers too, I'm directing these questions about the new electricity
tariffs directly to your Ministry.
As politicians are accustomed to answering different questions from those
asked, or not answering at all, would the person with the answers kindly
address questions 1-10 at
Please in your reply number the answers accordingly. Once received, your responses will appear on the same page, once any doubts about meaning are resolved.
Please be prepared to have your answers machine translated if they are not in English. Having made it this complex, this is not a topic with which to discriminate against up to one in six of the population by expecting them to understand a Slovene version.
But as it's Christmas I'm adding Candle and Apple, which seems to resemble the Slovenian electricity customer's situation, especially considering Ashla's advice at the end.
The Slovenian electricity customer's consumer manoeuvre differs from Candle and Apple in that he is blindfolded during the game, unless and until questions such as these are answered.
While the equivalent analogy for the consumer who is also a Non-Slovenian Mother Tonguer is being blindfolded, hogtied, and poked with a pointy stick while trying to make whatever choices are available to him/her correctly.
In short, certain important information is being deliberately left out. And not for the benefit of the consumers, whose survival strategies can involve spending a significant fraction of their income on energy bills. This is what the questions begin to address. Depending on the responses, further questions cannot be ruled out.
Even a tax on feed-in tariffs directly linked to storage and distribution projects would be better than no feed-in tariffs at all. Their absence reveals the real priorities are customer-be-damned, planet-be-damned, behemoth-centric thumb-twiddling. I hope that's not too harsh.
But being entirely independent of the energy companies, I'm sure you will want us consumers to get the best out of the planned improvements to the tariffs if that involves, for example, not drilling a hole while waiting for the kettle to boil and drying your overalls in the same 15 minutes.
And if the tariffs don't succeed in nudging consumption behaviour in the right direction (hard to see how, if no one understands them), you could make this kind of unpatriotic appliance use a reportable offence. Election gold!
Yours sincerely
Julian Bohan