Sodium Haze

An electricity bill looks like a price. It is closer to a receipt for decisions taken a decade earlier: which plants got built, which grid upgrades were deferred, which subsidy was promised in one budget and quietly dropped in the next. The number at the bottom is the last step in that chain, and it is the only step most of us are shown.

Most of what you pay was decided years ago

That gap between the decision and the invoice is where this site works. A tariff reform is argued over for two years and lands on a bill in a single line. A planning rule written for one city ends up setting rents in another. A tax break aimed at industry shows up as a change in what a used car costs. Trace it backwards and the price usually makes sense; read only the price and it never does.

Numbers arrive with a shelf life

The other half of the job is checking the figures themselves. Headline inflation gets revised. Employment counts change definition. Energy savings are quoted before installation and rarely measured after. Whoever publishes a number has a reason for publishing it that week, and the platforms that carry it are paid for attention rather than accuracy, which is its own kind of distortion worth naming.

So each piece here takes one question, follows it back to the decision that caused it, and puts dates and sources on every figure. Where the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, it says so instead of rounding the uncertainty away.