Should I get a price capped or green energy tariff? Article Discussion Area

rorymac_1

i'm a student moving into a new house in manchester for the first time. There are 7 of us living there and obviously I have no idea on our energy usage, but I would think it to be pretty high. I am not really sure what deal to switch to as we would only be interested in a yearly cap at most, as we may not remain at the house for more than 12months.

Is it cheaper for us to cap (Bearing in mind most price rises have been announced already)?

Or shall we just take the cheapest variable rate offered by the energyhelpline website, which I believe to be BG click energy 5 at £1638 compared to the best capped option of EON saver 4 at £2193?

Any help and advice would be much appreciated.

jacquidalton

I fixed with Npower on the 26th July and they wanted to charge me 58% more for my electricity but only 11% more to fix my Gas I was horrified when I checked the figures, lucky it came with a 14 day cooling off period.

Theo_Cupier

thymely wrote: »

Hi,

Southern Electric better plan are supposed to be 100% hydroelectricity, but are their prices likely to go up inline with conventional electricity prices?

On Southern Electric better plan paying £37/month via direct debit with 35% night usage on Economy 7. Should I change to capped?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
thymely

The Better Plan is slightly odd because you consume "conventional" electricity, but SE promise to buy / generate an EXTRA unit of hydroelectricity for every unit you consume. So fundamentally you are locked in to the regular electricity price dynamic, I think.

The electricity price is aligned to their standard electricity unit cost (at present anyway) so I imagine it will rise with their standard price.

We've just moved off this to SE's 2% discount rate.

patrick78uk

Just 2 days with MSE, I've found lots going on....

Scottish Power capped tariff is no longer available now...:sad: (I should sign up when getting the quote 2 days ago:mad: )
Just signed up with E.On to prevent missing it again:o

tonyhamm

Its pointless capping IMO.

(1) The market is Broken. Higher prices should be seeing more gas from Europe through the pipline.
For your information, E.On and EDF are two companies which have been driving the price of UK gas upwards, because they have not been selling gas to us from France and Germany through the interconnector when the price has been a lot higher in the UK than in Europe.

(2) A nonsense link in gas future delivery contracts to oil is driving the price of gas massively higher - The prices of oil and gas have been linked historically because factories used to heat their premises using oil and gas together. So the contracts which have been signed for supply have linked petrol prices to gas prices to regulate the supply price, (you couldnt make it up!)
Suppliers say they are tied by the wholesale market, but consumer groups say the price link between oil and gas should no longer exist. Energywatch described the link as "toxic" and said bills would fall significantly if they were decoupled.
(3) The UK has on hand only two weeks gas supply if a pipeline goes down or disruption occurs in the North sea. Most european countries have months and months. There has been a lack of planning - lots of storage will act as a price buffer - making sure we can store gas in underground old mines will bring the price down. More volatilty means higher prices.

(4) If you are a low user of Electricty and Gas - around 3200 kWh per year for both, its not worth capping, because even with the predicted prices rises you will get cheaper prices to 2009 by switching to a cheaper supplier. You will just lock yourself into high prices IMO.

IMO Its time for the gloves to come off, and make sure that the UK energy supply and market works properly. The first thing for the government to do, is to punish those companies which are operating in the national interests of France and Germany - E.On and EDF, who are hiking the price of our Gas, by not selling it back from storage in Europe when the UK gas price is far higher. This keeps jobs and companies in Europe rather than move to the high energy cost UK and is immensely damaging.

The second major thing is to remove the oil indexation from gas future supply contracts - deem it illegal - this is a cartel artifically, massively, jacking up the supply price of gas with nonsense - allowed to treat gas literally like petrol and reaping massive profits!

The third thing is to get a lot more gas storage sorted - this is essential anyway!

IMO its not worth capping. Its a falsehood that there is any shortage of gas, (other than through lack of uk storage planning) and most of the electricity price is artifically high through having the cartel of suppliers pull the wool over the eyes of the regulators with rubbish like oil indexation linking a pure commodity to another commodity! The second big thing is that by hook or crook the market will be made to work by 2008 never-mind 2009 IMO so our gas prices come down to europes!

Pound

I'm trying to work out how much British Gas charges me. It says on my statement that I'm charged 4.959p per kilowatt for the first 12.526 kilowatts used per day. Is it safe to multiply this number by 365 to find how many units per year are charged at the higher rate

MisterLukeC

tonyhamm wrote: »

IMO its not worth capping. Its a falsehood that there is any shortage of gas, (other than through lack of uk storage planning) and most of the electricity price is artifically high through having the cartel of suppliers pull the wool over the eyes of the regulators with rubbish like oil indexation linking a pure commodity to another commodity! The second big thing is that by hook or crook the market will be made to work by 2008 never-mind 2009 IMO so our gas prices come down to europes!

Thanks for this analysis Tonyhamm - I've been trawling this site for the past week or so trying to convince myself that I should cap (against my intuition), but I've been unable to find sufficient motivation.

Some people seem to scream "conspiracy theorist" if you suggest that there might be efforts to hype up the panic from some (unknown) quarters, but I personally can't help feeling that capping is far from a clear winning strategy for everybody (fixing a high price against an unstable market that may go down as well as up).

For me, changing over from BG to Ebico seemed to give me a 20-25% reduction according to the comparison sites (I am a 'low' user, and should have done that years ago anyway!), so I hope that their not-for-profit & no shareholder approach to business might insulate against any uneccessary price rises?!

You've made some really interesting points, I'd love to hear more about why you think gas prices might not rise, and may even come down into line with Europe. In other words, how do you think the 'broken market' might be fixed?

Babymerlin

Im sooooo confused!!!

said on the telly that doing nothing is setting me up for disaster, but dont help when you dont understand anything!!!!

wood i be better off just going on a comparison website and changing to the cheapest for my area? (im with BG for both at moment)

Chell

shjo558 wrote: »

I have went with Martins advice and capped with Scottish Power.

Bit scared now - how much will my payments go up by?!!

I changed mine on Sunday night but I am not sure if I went for the right one. The details came through today and it is the Fixed price till 2009, is this the capped one or is it different? I will get £62 Quidco cashback and my payments will be £79 a month at the moment which is a few quid cheaper than NPower that I was with.

patchwork_cat

Tonyhamm - one problem with your solution of storing gas down old mines is a) - they have to be vented don't they and b) I wouldn't want to live near one.( mind I wouldn't wanT to live near a gasometer either!) however I do appreciate your analysis .