Ecotricity - anyone used them?

emmafraggle wrote:

Hello there. This is my first posting on MSE so hopefully someone will reply!

I stumbled across an interesting and exciting website the other day http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/

They're a green energy provider who guarantee that if you switch to them, your electricity will only come from renewable energy sources, such as wind farms. They also guarantee that they will match your current supplier's rate - I emailed them about this and they offered to match Southern Electric's £25 a month rate, so I'm very keen to join up.

Has anybody come across them before and/or swapped their supplier to Ecotricity? I guess I'm just seeing if anyone's got any experiences, good or bad, before I take the plunge.

Many thanks,

Emma

Hi Emma

I too am considering Ecotricity as I visited their EcoTech Centre last week. I see you had no replies to your message - did you end up swapping in the end? Or has anyone else out there used them?
Thanx Liney

I am with them - changed about 9 months ago; partly because i wanted to support a 'green' supplier and they were also giving WWF a % if i swapped. My electricity bill has roughly worked out at £1 a day...not too bad!

Been there done that. I left them because the bills were erratic, and though supposedly "not for profit" they don't tell you how much salary the directors are paying themselves. They are also very agressive in fighting planning permission refusals. Councils are strapped for cash and cannot afford to continue legal battles, (it is a tactic used by Tesco a lot), Whilst I am in favour of wind farms I do think there is a time and a place for them, and if a council has reasonable grounds for refusal I don't expect my money to towards the cost of refusing to accept that decision.

Also not all the leccy they supply is green they don't have the capacity to supply all the customers on green power so they sell standard power to most customers. Which is the same thing you get from most suppliers, for example Swalec have dinorwic (?) hydroelectric power station so a certain % of welsh power is green just as is Scottish. But I realise the idea is to reinvest the profits (after paying the directors undisclosed sums) into more windfarms which is a good thing in the right place.

I say undisclosed, I mean they don't advertise the amounts (or they didn't before) The sums can be vaguely looked into by looking at the accounts they have to submit to companies house, but these amounts will always be out of date information.

But if they could supply all of thier customers needs with their own power (even though it does get mixed up that's not the point) I would look at them as a more serious option.

Yes but "sold" means all the electricity they sell, a lot of which (I don't have figures to quote) is currently not green.