Payment

Woah! Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted! As tempting as it is to continue with the theme, we’d better cut to the chase!

Smart Meters are arriving as we speak. The DECC (Dept. of Energy & Climate Change) talk in terms of: 160,000 05‐08 profile electricity meters and 40,000 large gas meters (732 MWhs). These are all supposed to be replaced by 2014 and guess what, DECC and OFGEM are still discussing with energy suppliers the type and capability of the meters to be used, it’s that ‘VHS vs. BETAMAX’ debate all over again.

Worse still some suppliers (and we’re including the ‘big six’ in this) have seen this as some sort of opportunity to tie businesses into long‐term metering contracts, making it difficult to change suppliers come supply contract renewal time, and making spurious claims about ‘interoperability with other suppliers’ meters’.

Lets be clear there may be some technical issues, however, commercial restrictions are certainly not acceptable, and these views we believe are endorsed by the DECC. To make matters worse, there are instances of energy suppliers ringing business customers and telling them they must have a new smart meter by next April…it’s simply not true.

Our advice right now is ‘Hold Your Horses!’ be very careful about any Smart Meter arrangements, get Torse to check things out first…

In an effort to assist and, where possible, protect small businesses and vunerable consumers paying increasing energy costs, Ofgem have imposed a set of guidelines for energy suppliers. The Ofgem press release is attached below but a brief summary of these changes are as follows:

1. New requirements on written estimates following visits from face-to-face salespeople will come into force on 18 January 2010. Essentially, this would put an end to Contracts being signed that don’t match what was ‘promised’.

2. Doubling the threshold of debt a customer can carry and still switch supplier to £200 will come into force on 18 January 2010. This reduces the practical obstacle that has delayed many clients in the transfer process.

3. Further clarity in printed billing information [via PDF or post] from suppliers and the production of annual statements to customers if these are not already in existance from July 2010. This provides improved billing management.

4. Requirement for the six big energy companies to show more openess regarding their margins from the business community in these difficult financial times. This should enable businesses to see to what extent they are being exploited within the market.

Ofgem Assistance for SME and Consumers Press Release PDF

Are you using a domestic energy profile for your business? If so, there are considerable tax and insurance implications for your business. This article examines why these profiles exist, how to find out if you are using the wrong profile, what to do to change this and how a change would benefit the security of your future contracts.

Background

The original intention of all profiles was to structure pricing and consumption patterns to match the type of electricity usage. Simplistically 01 and 02 profile meters are intended for domestic properties whereas the commercial market starts off with 03 and 04 profiles, which are at the smaller end of business consumers and are typically ‘billed’ quarterly. 05 to 08 profiles inclusive are larger business consumers, billed monthly. There are still particular meters which might have upto 7 different rates based on time of day.The final profile the 00 or ‘half-hourly’ (the meter sends out via a radio signal, a reading every half hour). These are typically high use businesses. continue

Double billing can occur when changing energy supplier and involves both the new and old supplier charging for energy usage in the overlap between the end of one contract and the beginning of another. In short, the user is paying for the same energy twice.

One of the major causes of this are incorrectly processed meter readings where the new supplier makes an estimate of usage but the old supplier, for whatever reason, does not receive them or does not process them correctly. This can lead to a final account figure missing on the old supplier’s system and therefore the old supplier will keep billing the customer until a final official reading has been logged in the system from the new supplier.

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