The cap went up yesterday.
Lunchtime is still nearly free.
It landed. About £18 a month more for a typical household, gas doing most of the damage. And yet, within 48 hours of the rise, British wholesale electricity will almost certainly trade near zero again on a sunny afternoon. Both of these are the same energy system.
📬 What actually changed on 1 July
The cap is not a cap on your bill. It caps the unit rate and the standing charge. Use more, pay more, cap or no cap.
For a typical household the change is around £18 a month, assuming this level held for a full year. Gas is up about 24%, electricity about 5%.
If you have a fixed tariff, nothing happened yesterday. If you are on a variable tariff, it happened automatically and nobody asked you.
🤷 The absurd bit
Here is the thing that should bother you more than it does. On the same day the cap rose, the actual wholesale cost of electricity was near zero for part of the afternoon.
You were not charged near zero, because you pay a flat rate that averages the whole day into one number.
So the cheap hours exist. You are simply not allowed to feel them. You pay the average, and someone else captures the difference.
🔑 How to actually feel the cheap hours
Two ways. Move onto a tariff that passes through real prices, which suits some households and genuinely does not suit others.
Or leave your tariff exactly as it is, and get paid separately for letting the grid move your devices into the cheap hours. No switching, no exit fee, no new supplier.
The second one works for the roughly 22 million accounts locked into a fix who cannot do the first one even if they wanted to.
Your bill went up on Wednesday because of a gas market thousands of miles away. Your electricity will go free again on Saturday because of the weather outside your window. Only one of those has anything to do with you, and it is not the one on the news.