There'll be fireworks today - and not because they're left over from Bonfire Night. EDF and British Gas are announcing their latest quarterly profits - the first since the eye-watering bill hikes millions have suffered over the summer.
When it came to putting up bills, the big energy companies fell into line like dominoes - and the people left floored are the millions around the country looking ahead to a winter of struggling to pay to heat their home.
With average bills now topping £1300 a year and an estimated one in four officially defined as being in fuel poverty, these profit announcements will be enough to raise hackles across the country. If that weren't enough, as well as outrageous profits, there's also the issue of people having the wool pulled over their eyes about the true reason for bill hikes.
Gas prices have rocketed in the last ten years - and they're up 90% since the year 2000. While gas prices have climbed, so too have profits of the big energy firms - almost a third higher in 2010 than in 2008, standing, last year, at a staggering combined total of £8.6 billion. Rocketing gas prices have given energy companies an opportunity to pass on inflated prices to consumers - and a golden opportunity to pocket the difference. No wonder shareholders are smiling.
Yet the rising cost of gas has been conspicuously absent from recent media reports purporting to spill the beans on our spiralling energy bills. Keen to apportion blame, commentators have leapt on green policies as a simplistic explanation for bill hikes. They have ignored the fact that they make up a mere fraction of our bills - 6% on an average dual fuel bill - and are actually helping many save money by cutting the energy we waste.
Now is the time for the government to get tough on the energy companies. The public is not a golden goose that will keep on laying - people are livid that they're paying through the nose for energy from companies who have been investigated time and again miss-selling, bamboozling us with hundreds of tariffs and inflating prices to such a level that energy bills are a real worry for the many, not just the impoverished few.
Yet things can be different. The UK has a massive potential for energy generated from our wind, waves and sun. At the moment these sources contribute to a measly 8% of our electricity supply, but they could contribute so much more. A UK with a huge investment in renewable energy would be a UK which is a world-leader, not a follower; a UK with thousands of new green jobs, warmer homes and, if we cut the amount of energy we waste, a better deal for consumers in the long-run, too.
The big six energy companies are making billions by keeping us hooked on dirty and increasingly expensive fossil fuels and risky nuclear power - and the public has endured enough pain to know this approach isn't working. That's why Friends of the Earth will be outside EDF's London headquarters today to call for radical change.
Thousands of people have signed our petition calling for an overhaul of the UK's energy system starting with a public inquiry into the big six's power and urgent action to stop the government killing off support for clean green British energy providers. Achieve that, and then we'll be cooking with gas.
Join Friends of the Earth's Final Demand campaign at www.foe.co.uk/finaldemand