On Monday 21st August 2006 Powergen, one of the largest gas and electricity suppliers in the UK with around 9 million customers will be raising their domestic prices again. Electricity and gas prices will rise by 9.7% and 18.4% respectively, these rises being attributed to "increasing wholesale costs, which have risen by 87% for both electricity and gas since the beginning of last year" according to the Powergen press release. Of course the interesting thing is why the wholesale prices have increased but companies and media don't tend to talk about that.

It seems we hear of similar price increases every few weeks these days, and in fact this announcement from Powergen now means that all the major suppliers (also British Gas, EDF, npower, ScottishPower and Scottish and Southern Energy) have announced two price rises this year.

It's easy to lose track of the price rises when they are only announced as percentage increases (the absolute price per kWh varies slightly with location). I've recently been trawling the press releases as reported by BBC News Online[1] to see exactly what has happened with gas and electricity prices over the last few years.