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My energy supplier - http://www.hydro.co.uk./, charges me 9.21p for electricity and 2.36p for gas. That is a pretty typical differential between electricity and gas round here.

It's not surprising that electricity is a lot more expensive than gas. Gas is the raw material for most of the electricity generated in this country. To sell me gas, they just need to pipe it to my home. To turn it into electricity, there is a lot more work to do.

In this case, a 70% efficient device runs at about 77% efficiency in the winter, and a lot less than 70% efficiency in the summer, as I have to pay for even more electricity to cool the place down.

Nope, it doesn't appear to have been fully rejected. Scottish Hydro Electric appear to offer the service. Website with details here:
Scottish Hydro

Used to be the only company in Scotland but recently there have been shake ups nad now you cna choose what company you get you electricity from.

So if it's no good for signalling on, why are there commercially deployed Broadband over Power Line projects in mainland Europe and Commercial trials in Scotland and England offering 1Mb symmetrical connections.

Broadband over power lines is technically unfeasible because of the ridiculous amount of radio interference generated.

Hmmm... am I missing something then? One of the guys at my work got broadband from Scottish Hydro-Electric and regularly gets speeds of 1Mbps each way.

BTW, despite the pages looking like it's a done deal, they've only trialled it in two towns to date and have no availability checker on their Web site, so I'm not expecting this to be rolled out to a wider UK audience for quite some time yet.

Oh, and the very obvious reason why this seeming dead duck is still being touted around is that rural UK users have neither cable nor ADSL. With satellite Internet being ludicrously expensive, this powerlines gubbins [if it works properly] might be the only way that those in the "country" can get broadband at a sensible price...

Scottish Hydro has already done this.

Not at all true for the UK. SSE is going ahead with commercial trials in Stonehaven and Winchester, after earlier technology trials in Crieff and Cambeltown.

See the SSE site for more info and an interview on ISPReview (2 articles) here and here

Already IS happening :) take a look here here

Trials still going on in Scotland apparently [£15/mo. for 2Mib/s, sweet]. I also seem to remember seeing something recently about the technology being refined and ready for use in the UK. Apparently in the US it wouldn't be economical as each station would only serve a few people due to way their power infrastructure is set up.

By providing circuits to power substations and then setting up PLC kit there SSE have been able to provide such high speed access to an area that the telcos and cable companies are never going to cover in a million years.
They're not looking to be cheaper, they're looking to cover the areas that won't normally be reached.

Further Information as shown in a presentation I went to several months back

You didn't try hard enough.

The service is currently available in certain areas of Crieff and Campbeltown only.

Try plugging the postcode "PA28 6HU" (which is in Campbeltown) into the form.

Man, I wish I lived there! Their speed comparisions implies the download speed is 2Mbps (about 4x a 512Kbps line)! And the pricing is great - either 15 or 25 pounds/month! That's about 25 or 40 USD/month! Sweet.

Man, I wish I lived there! Their speed comparisions implies the download speed is 2Mbps (about 4x a 512Kbps line)! And the pricing is great - either 15 or 25 pounds/month! That's about 25 or 40 USD/month! Sweet.