We have clients who pay anything from considerably less than 10p/kWh to over 19p/kWh! A common problem is that at the end of a fixed-term, fixed-price contract you are likely to be rolled over on to a “standard tariff”. A standard tariff is far from standard! When it happened to me last month it represented a price increase of about 30%. We have recently advised a client with a very high electricity bill to switch from a 16p/kWh tariff to one that is about 10.5p/kWh, thereby saving several thousands of pounds per year.
No matter how you heat your home, be it ground source heat pump or fossil fuel, there is little point in paying more than you need to for your energy supplies. The deal you can get will depend on whether you have a ‘commercial’ or a ‘domestic’ supply, how much electricity you use per year, and where you live. It is a competitive market and if have not shopped around recently – and according to Which more than 2/3 of people haven’t – it is almost certain that you are paying more than you need to.
For domestic consumers, the price comparison websites (Utilities Warehouse, uswitch, GoCompare, MoneySupermarket, Compare the Market etc) are normally very useful for checking what tariffs are available to you. To use them you will need to know your typical annual usage, your current supplier and your tariff. As has been well publicised recently, you have to be careful with these websites. They purport to give you the best tariffs available – and so they do. However unless you tell them to give you all the tariffs, including the ones that you cannot switch to automatically from their website that don’t pay them a commission, the best ones may be hidden. Often the hidden tariffs are the cheapest!
For commercial organisations, use a trusted energy broker or utility consultants such as ESS to help you get the best tariff for you.
If you want to switch suppliers, you need to check that you are not on a fixed term tariff. If you are, there will be a penalty charge for leaving early. If you are paying far too much, it might still be worth switching. Once you have started the switch over, it normally takes about 5-6 weeks for the transfer to complete. It is easy to do and does not lead to an interruption is supply. You buy the same electricity over the same wires from the same National Grid. What changes is the company that does the billing. Electrical safety and dealing with power cuts remains the responsibility of your local Distribution Network Operator (DNO). That does not change when you change suppliers. I have just switched my supply at home and reduced my unit rate from 11.68p/kWh to 10.2p/kWh, an annual saving of about 13%.
