What's the point in multiple energy suppliers now?

wakeupalarm

Without multiple companies the pretence of competition would be exposed, the directors would not have other companies to compare their performance based bonus against to justify their huge increases.  Government ministers couldn't do private deals with their mates.  The comparison sites would have to shutdown. There would be no point in National Grid, the energy producers would only have one body to deal with for the UK, most of the customer service agents will become unemployed, energy consultants would be out of a job, the Government may be forced to come up with an actual energy policy.

Ultrasonic

wakeupalarm said:

There would be no point in National Grid, 

I think we'd all find we'd struggle without the infrastructure to transfer electricity to our homes being maintained...

wrf12345

Retail energy and taxes account for about thirty percent of the price, the network and actual energy cost the rest of it. Those cheap fixed deals to get new customers only existed because a lot of people could not be bothered switching and were paying a lot more, which in turn led to capped standard tariffs. Now we end up with the same tariff, more or less, from all the companies and very few options to change if customer service becomes bad. The only way to force efficiency into the system is to squeeze the percentage that retail energy takes out of the customer's payments over time plus very large fines for customer service infractions - the fine money totted up and given back to the customers as a rebate (divided amongst all accounts to avoid scammers).

It may be better to let National Grid buy gas and electric for the country and retail energy merely become admin agents that will gently be phased out over time when everyone has smart meters and internet accounts that can be cheaply run by National Grid, whose buying power should be able to get the best deals - I would not even object if the employees got huge bonuses on the back of consistently falling prices, just to get the best people doing the job.