This morning I see the BBC News website caries a story covering Conservative Party plans to aid "home power generation" on the basis that large scale power generation is wasteful and costly, inclusing plans to allow us to charge the network to accept our excess power.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7130127.stm

This is an insane waste of time and diversion from the true problem with our country and its power generation strategy.

Have any of you ever heard of something called The "New Electricity Trading Arrangements" (NETA)?

Do you realise your electricity companies are required to gamble on the exact number of megawatts their customers will consume every half hour in the coming months and must face incredibly high penalty costs not only if they find their customers using more than this - causing a shortfall - but face the same penalty costs if their customers use LESS that this.

Did you know that when such companies "get it wrong" it allows others to make a killing by bailing them out.

Did you know these insane arrangements mean it now PAYS power companies to sign agreements wuith big businesses giving them power amazingly cheaply in return for having control of the heavy power consuming processes that the business uses, because by giving the power company the control of the switch, allowing them to use the power when it suits tham and cut it off when it does not, they make more money by avoiding penalty clause payments for over and under production, and can smugly respond to requests for help from the network when companies who have gambled incorrectly find themselves in the brown smelly stuff as a result.

I say our power companies should be in the busines of making power, and not forced to waste the money we have to pay to them in distractions like gambling and making steel, cement and petrochemicals in ordr to avoid penalties and fines.

Does David Cameron think our power companies should be in the gambling and manufacturing business ? And has whoever is thinking up his campaigns and speeches for him actually sat down and worked out how much this insanity has cost us ?