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UTILITY WEEK | 6Th - 12Th FEbrUarY 2015 | 3 Leader Ellen Bennett This week 4 | Seven days 6 | People & Opinion 8 | Interview Tim rotheray, director, association for Decentralised Energy 12 | Topic: Future cities What is the place for conventional utilities in cities of the future? 19 Policy & Regulation 19 | News Severn Trent to cut dividend by 5 per cent 20 | Analysis The much-amended Infrastructure bill 21 Finance & Investment 21 | News Decc bolsters low carbon funding pot 22 Operations & Assets 22 | High viz anglian Water 23 | Pipe up Denise Massey 24 | Market view Scottish water sector can teach us a lot about data 26 Customers 26 | News Water bills shrink 2 per cent for 2015/16 27 | Market view Collaborate for better care 28 Markets & Trading 28 | Market view EU market reform to boost carbon price 30 Community 30 | Reader of the week richard Coffey, Supply UK Water Services 31 | Disconnector Fag packet sums do industry no favours With the general election now firmly in view, the flurry of "statistics" is reaching fever pitch. Take this week's report from Which?, where the consumer body claims to have "analysed movements in retail energy prices over the past two years in relation to commonly used hedging strategies", and so come up with the figure of £2.9 billion that energy companies have apparently withheld from consumers over the past year. The science behind this number is anything but sound – presumably Which? has no better information on the energy companies' hedging strategies, a closely guarded competitive secret, than the rest of us. Yet a few sums on the back of a fag packet generated a story that was on every radio show and in every newspaper on Tuesday morning; another hammer blow to the public perception of energy companies. It's not just Which? at it. Indeed, you can hardly blame the consumer body when the energy regulator itself is playing the same game. Energy UK's Lawrence Slade came out guns blazing on the perennial bugbear of the Supply Market Indicator this week, calling on Ofgem to abandon the "wildly exaggerated" report. Good for him – let's hope Ofgem's top team of Dermot Nolan and David Gray is willing to finally move away from the regular publication of these misleading figures. With all these contradictory numbers flying around, the pub- lic's confusion and frustration with the energy industry are hardly surprising. Once the election is over and the industry is able to work with the new government to resolve this stand-off, impartial numbers that industry, politicians and public alike can believe in will be crucial. • It might be hard to see beyond May at the moment, but as Jane Gray points out in this month's Topic, utilities that fail to look further ahead could have a dismal future. With 70 per cent of a forecast 10 billion global population expected to live in cities by 2050, the urban conurbations in which we live and work are going to look very different indeed. If utilities want to play a part, the planning must start now. See p12. Ellen Bennett, Editor ellen.bennett@fav-house.com GaS 20 | Analysis The much- amended Infrastructure bill 23 | Pipe us Denise Massey WaTEr 19 | News Severn Trent to cut dividend by 5 per cent 22 | High viz anglian Water 24 | Market view Scottish water sector can teach us a lot about data 26 | News Water bills shrink 2 per cent for 2015/16 ELECTrICITY 13 | Market view Green subsidies cleared 14 | Analysis Solar burnt by its own success EnErGY 8 | Interview Tim rotheray, director, association for Decentralised Energy 12 | Topic: future cities What is the place for conventional utilities in cities of the future? 21 | News Decc bolsters low carbon funding pot 27 | Market view Collaborate for better care 28 | News EU market reform to boost carbon price Knowledge worth keeping Visit the Downloads section of Utility Week's website http://www.utilityweek.co.uk/ downloads O Power: The tranformation from com- modity suppliers http://bit.ly/1FQobpA Rolta: White Paper: IT and OT: In Tune and On Time http://bit.ly/1qPuBgR