Chief Executive on Breakfast TV today, extolling their virtues and how transparent, cheap and green they are compared to the big six. A few lies there, for a start obscene standing charges for gas of 23p per day compared to
10p for major players and in general more expensive per kWh.
Having twice as much energy sourced from renewables and significantly less nuclear they are also, by their own admission, churning out nearly 10% more CO2 than the national average.
Ouch, there are some very silly standing charges about but quite often balanced by a lower per unit cost. So if your use is say above
10 units/day even quite a high standing charge an lower unit costs can give an overall lower bill than no standing charge but higher unit costs. Spreadsheets are wonderful for this sort of modeling...
I've just moved tariff within nPower to their "Price Fix April 2015 DD" (17 months, electricity only) at 14.2p/unit (+ VAT @ 5%) and as paying by fixed monthly DD no standing charge (or Tier 1/Tier 2 rates). The DD discount is paid each month and is the same as the standing charge, I think...
Shift prompted by them hoiking the Standard price from 14.95 to
16.45. Looked at a couple of comparison sites and there was only one other tariff and that would only save about £4/year against the Standard tarrif.
nPower had a fixed until Dec 2017 (50 months) but at 16.09p/unit our use is likely to change from 3 units/day to 15 to 20/day on that meter in the next year...
OVO guarantee that 100% of my electricity will be from renewable supplies for only £60 extra over what I'm currently paying from the rip-off suppliers!
Indeed. Even ignoring the "for more than the rip-off supplier" bit... Alan - I presume that "guarantee" includes some kind of sanction should non-renewable electrons ever sully your consumer unit?
'guarantees' huh? which menas that they willhave contarcts with drax, who burn coal, bt aussre them that the actual electricity they generate will be from the wood burning part..
They probably trade carbon offsets to be green. drax could do it for the entire coal output by just buying some carbon offsets from some tribe in Africa that wasn't going to burn the coal in the first place.
I don't think there is very much Solar PV out there that a reseller can buy. The piddly little bit on peoples homes (100,000 @ 3kWp = 300 MW on a bright sunny day *everywhere*) isn't available on the wholesale market.
What I expect they are doing is just paper trading. Over some period of time, (year months), they buy enough renewable energy (when it's available) to cover what they are selling. Strictly speaking at any given moment they cannot say that there actually is enough renewable energy available to supply all of their customers. Unless they have very few customers or the lights of their customers do go out, those customers are being conned IMHO.
And the EDF Blue ones, though with normally well over 5 GW of nuke available 24/7 it's not as bad as a "100% renewable" tariff when there can be long periods when there is naff all (
well EDF blue is also 'renewable' and includes imported French nukey power (up to 2GW*) . EDF has a LOT of surplus nuclear capacity in France except in the bleak midwinter..
when the link is working, plus it is also possible to 'import' more power than the link will stand if someone somewhere else is buying UK power to use on the continent. The link transfers the actual difference.
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