Tomato Energy (Electric Only Supplier) - Too Good To Be True ?

masonic

TroubledTarts said:

masonic said:

TroubledTarts said:

bagand96 said:

TroubledTarts said:

Is there a sweepstake on Tomato?

Just watched a piece on when avro went bust and they had 600,000 customers in the end with a cost to all of us of £1000 per customer £600 million in total.

How big do we think Tomato will get before they potentially fail?

When a supplier collapses, the main costs are protecting the customer's credit balances which are guaranteed by Ofgem to ensure consumers don't lose out.

Tomato don't hold credit balances. They operate variable Direct Debit. They send you your monthly bill, they then take that amount as the DD a few days later.

So in the event they collapse there won't be millions of pounds of to cover customer funds. The only costs would be moving customers to an SoLR. Very different situation to Avro and others.

Still wishing Tomato success, even if that may be against the grain on these boards. 

Are you sure of the piece highlighter in bold?

When Avro Energy collapsed, the final cost to customers was estimated at around £700 million by Ofgem, the energy regulator, with the company owing approximately £90 million to its 580,000 customers at the time of its collapse.

The added complication being tomato's solar panel and battery tariff that might not fit with all suppliers so that could hold things up from an solar process whilst they perform due diligence.

The credit balances of the failed supplier's customers are covered by borrowings, which are repaid through a levy on all customers.

I know that thankyou I was pointing out the balances owed was 90million but the final cost to all of us was 700million which was not made up of mostly of customer balances that's just one part of the overall cost when a supplier goes bust and was just correcting the poster who I replied to.

Fair enough, misread your post. Yes there can also be significant costs involved in compensating the SoLR, though it was reported that Octopus claimed less than half of what it could. The £700m as far as I can see was an estimate based on the need for the SoLR to buy energy to cover the customer's usage over winter at a time when wholesale prices were at insane levels and Ofgem were requiring all suppliers to sell energy at a considerable discount to the market price. I'm not sure a figure was ever reported for the total Octopus actually claimed. In Avro's case, there also appeared to be some significant costs associated with not meeting requirements of the ECO scheme. According to the administrators, the cost of the Transitional Services Agreement (keeping things running to ensure an orderly transfer of customers) borne by Octopus was £1.6m.

masonic

Encouragingly, for the second weekend in a row, MyWatts has outperformed Loop and Bright and kept up with my energy data. Fingers crossed they've fixed whatever issue was causing it to stop updating at weekends.

bagand96

TroubledTarts said:

bagand96 said:

TroubledTarts said:

Is there a sweepstake on Tomato?

Just watched a piece on when avro went bust and they had 600,000 customers in the end with a cost to all of us of £1000 per customer £600 million in total.

How big do we think Tomato will get before they potentially fail?

When a supplier collapses, the main costs are protecting the customer's credit balances which are guaranteed by Ofgem to ensure consumers don't lose out.

Tomato don't hold credit balances. They operate variable Direct Debit. They send you your monthly bill, they then take that amount as the DD a few days later.

So in the event they collapse there won't be millions of pounds of to cover customer funds. The only costs would be moving customers to an SoLR. Very different situation to Avro and others.

Still wishing Tomato success, even if that may be against the grain on these boards. 

Are you sure of the piece highlighter in bold?

When Avro Energy collapsed, the final cost to customers was estimated at around £700 million by Ofgem, the energy regulator, with the company owing approximately £90 million to its 580,000 customers at the time of its collapse.

The added complication being tomato's solar panel and battery tariff that might not fit with all suppliers so that could hold things up from an solar process whilst they perform due diligence.

Fair enough, may be my misunderstanding of the full situation. The only reference I can find to £700million is an estimated cost, is there any final data? 

TroubledTarts

bagand96 said:

TroubledTarts said:

bagand96 said:

TroubledTarts said:

Is there a sweepstake on Tomato?

Just watched a piece on when avro went bust and they had 600,000 customers in the end with a cost to all of us of £1000 per customer £600 million in total.

How big do we think Tomato will get before they potentially fail?

When a supplier collapses, the main costs are protecting the customer's credit balances which are guaranteed by Ofgem to ensure consumers don't lose out.

Tomato don't hold credit balances. They operate variable Direct Debit. They send you your monthly bill, they then take that amount as the DD a few days later.

So in the event they collapse there won't be millions of pounds of to cover customer funds. The only costs would be moving customers to an SoLR. Very different situation to Avro and others.

Still wishing Tomato success, even if that may be against the grain on these boards. 

Are you sure of the piece highlighter in bold?

When Avro Energy collapsed, the final cost to customers was estimated at around £700 million by Ofgem, the energy regulator, with the company owing approximately £90 million to its 580,000 customers at the time of its collapse.

The added complication being tomato's solar panel and battery tariff that might not fit with all suppliers so that could hold things up from an solar process whilst they perform due diligence.

Fair enough, may be my misunderstanding of the full situation. The only reference I can find to £700million is an estimated cost, is there any final data? 

Yeah upon double checking I found 700 million as well. But I am also sure you are right that if there are no credit balances that will help and reduce the overall figure should something bad happen.

QrizB

Avro only had 580k customers, so for "customer balances" to have cost £700M they'd have needed an average credit balance of £1200.

There's a table on page 6 of this pdf that breaks down Octopus's costs:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/SOLR Levy true-up Minded-to position - Octopus-Avro.pdf

Wholesale costs were ~£610M, while customer balances were only ~£50M.

Plus another £1.1M for "working capital" in 2024:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2024-09/Octopus_Energy_LRSP_claim_for_Avro_Minded_to_position_for_consultation.pdf

HillStreetBlues

Newbie_John said:

HillStreetBlues said:

As I'm too lazy to scroll through 60 odd pages and not even sure if it was thread, is/was TE reducing bills based on billing delay?

It was mentioned something like 15% for 3 months delay, 30% for 6 months and written off for 1 year+

So bill for September should be discounted 15%
- bill for June should be 30% cheaper.. 

But were people actually billed with discount yet? No idea - everything works perfectly fine on my side. 

I moved on the 2nd Sep and after a couple of months got my first bill 2nd Sep to 30th Sep
Today I received two bills one dated 1st Oct to 31st Dec  & 1st Jan to 31st Jan
I got a 15% discount on the whole of the 1st Oct to 31st Dec bill.

Newbie_John

@HillStreetBlues are you SMET1? 

HillStreetBlues

Dumb meter, upload reading every month of the MyWatts site.

Newbie_John

HillStreetBlues said:

Dumb meter, upload reading every month of the MyWatts site.

I wonder why it took so long then..
Was it worth the 15% for them?
They had the numbers, just needed to multiply  by rate 😜

HillStreetBlues

Newbie_John said:

HillStreetBlues said:

Dumb meter, upload reading every month of the MyWatts site.

I wonder why it took so long then..
Was it worth the 15% for them?
They had the numbers, just needed to multiply  by rate 😜

I read about the issues with TE but thought it can't be that hard I supply a reading every month, how wrong I was.
Still have ongoing issue that's with the Ombudsman https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6582448/energy-ombudsman