Competition + Costs
The electricity market like many other specialist areas is beset with myths and misunderstandings. That’s partly because the generation, transmission and pricing of power is genuinely a complicated business. It’s not just householders that are baffled about their bills. Companies don’t really understand either why they are paying so much. The industry doesn’t help much by communicating in dense and sometimes impenetrable language.
Appropriately for an electricity website, enirgy.info aims to shine a light into the workings of the market. On these pages we will try as far as possible to make comprehensible its workings and where necessary force the industry to justify its practices and pricing. Good quality information is key here because unless you understand some of the realities of the industry, you can’t make a sound case for change.
Competition is held up as the best way to ensure prices are kept as low as possible. There is something to that theory but it depends on a perfectly functioning market where everyone has access to the same information. That patently is not the case here. By highlighting differences in charges, the website should help to moderate prices but that ambition will only be realised if consumers are prepared to check their bills and be ready to move supplier.
One of the best ways to see how our market is performing is to look at what homes spend across the border, in Great Britain and in the rest of the EU. The Irish Republic is a particularly important comparator because both North and South are supplied by the same Single Electricity Market. In theory prices here should be close to prices down there. If they are not, then it’s important to know why. As comparison is such a powerful tool, you will see it put to good use on the website.
We do not have the resources to answer random queries about electricity but if you have an important question you want to raise, please get in contact and we will try to find out the answer.