When the energy companies were able to compete, it struck me as odd that some companies were offering different rates in different regions.
For electricity, you can perhaps remember SEEBOARD (in the South East) and MANWEB covering Merseyside and North Wales, SWALEC for South Wales, and so on.
Clearly when competition started, some companies (such as MANWEB) were the target for other power firms, which would undercut the MANWEB rate by some percentage.
Here we are, nearly 20 years on, and we know there's a 'national grid' and that whether you pay British Gas or nPower or someone else for your electricity, it comes through the same power lines and local sub-station to your house (people with their own electrical generation systems should go off and do your own thing at this point!)
I was just looking at a list of charges made by EDF (which is launching a new night-time discount rate for electricity) and saw that there are quite significant differences between the cheapest and most costly rates.
It's complicated, insofar as this EDF Eco 20:20 tariff has three different rates, 2 for daytime and the discount night rate, and the differences between two households using power in the same way depends on how much is used at each of the three rates.
I'll be happy to put some spreadsheets online for anyone who really wants to compare but hope others can take my word for it that based on the rates they publish PDF price info (link on This Page) the highest rates are 15% to near 18% higher (eg 20.19p/kwH) than the lowest (17.15p/kWh), and the night rate differences run up to 20% and even 26% (cheapest 7.83p/kWh, most costly 9.90p/kWh)
The EDF site indicates an average home uses 3300 kWh per year, and the way they charge, the first 222 kWh each quarter is at the highest rate, the rest would be split into the second and third bands (the third for night-time is approx 20% below the second band).
By putting together a spreadsheet and giving winter months a larger portion of the power consumption, I came up with figures for annual charges from 377.38 to 425.89 with the most costly being almost 50 pounds (over 12%) higher. Clearly the amounts could vary much more for some households.
When you go to one of the price comparison sites, they have hundreds of different charges, because so much depends on where you live.
My question is, why should a family in one region pay as much as 26% more for electricity at night than another family in a different region, when the actual costs to the power company are identical.
I was comparing these charges with telephone costs - we can all get exactly the same rates from a company like BT or a competitor, and it doesn't matter where you live. We can change to a cheaper telecom firm, and they don't vary the price if we live in the north or the south. Is it not time to get the power firms to have the same charge for everyone on the same tariff deal ?
Yes, I know that it would need a lot of adjustments, and some regions might have prices increased by a firm {while another may need to decrease theirs} but overall it would be simpler for these comparison sites to work, and for anyone doing a check manually, it would mean less chance of misreading the tables of figures!
It would also mean that they could show the cost in pence on TV or newspaper adverts and hopefully the whole bunch would become more competitive.