Switching electric/gas providers (see first post for links)

Govt. will end up going back to the energy credits this winter.

Be better all around if they introduced an price cap, similar to what you get in the UK... Any companies that can't charge a fair rate can go bust as far as I'm concerned

Holy sh#t!😳

What is the profit? Some people don't care about the price and pay full whack, others are price sensitive and shop around.

You could renationalise the whole lot, but doing this by the back door by eliminating profit would likely not be legal.

It doesn't matter how cheap solar or wind get we pay the highest wholesale price for every kWh generated regardless of what we use… A bizzare situation that we should have changed back in 2022 but went with 'energy credits' instead

Don't EI automatically offer a discount if bill paid on time? Additionally EI are the only ones who don't use artificially high unit prices to make discounts % feel bigger and then catch people after 12 months with massive bills. How many people are being milked by the others after deals end. Funny enough I think the Stereotypical elderly pensioner as technologically challenged and unable to change utilities regularly will soon be gone( i.e we are comming to a stage were those turning pension age will have growup and been relatively young when computers became widespread)

An expert explains Irish electricity prices - Waterford Whispers

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CYWRpVMxS/

Can anyone tell me the cheapest night rates in Ireland?

I am looking to get a battery/batteries for my house to charge up at night on cheap rates and use during the day when more expensive. I'm hoping to cut my bill by at least half by doing this. When I can afford later down the line I'd get solar panels to connect to them.

The French government uses specific legal mechanisms to force EDF to sell a huge chunk of that cheap nuclear power back to domestic suppliers and consumers at a fixed, low price.

Yes exactly this... This would be the Irish equivalent of the solar/wind farms bring legally forced to supply the Irish domestic users with a fixed low price. We have the same capabilities as France from that perspective but we prefer to pay the highest price on the market.

In 2022 we should have realized this crazy pricing system doesn't work and legislated it away. Even if we did need to do that at European level.

The fixed energy credit made little to no difference to higher energy users while those who used less saw an unfair credit applied to their bill. A fairer energy credit would have been paid out per unit of electricity for example

Dynamic tariffs are being introduced and will see prices decrease when the wind blows and when the sun shines.

I would be very happily surprised if dynamic tariffs brought down the price of electricity, but I don't see it honestly. Electric Ireland's pricing is 19.81/8.25/22.55 before you add in the wholesale price

are there not cooling off periods too?

Irish solar/wind is not equivalent to Frances nuclear. France forces EDF to sell nuclear power that already exists and operates 24/7 as a steady baseline. You can't just legislate a fixed low price for wind and solar because they are intermittent. If a wind farm is forced to sell at a fixed low price, who pays for the expensive gas generation required to back them up when the wind stops blowing? In France, that energy is produced 24/7.

As for "legislating it away" at an EU level in 2022, member states actually tried. It resulted in the EU Electricity Market Reform, which explicitly kept marginal pricing because it's what incentivizes private companies to build renewables in the first place. Without it, developers simply won't build the infrastructure we need. That's why it exists.

Your reply to me was we can't blame the EU. Marginal pricing is an EU requirement.

France invested in nuclear over 50+ years. They can control prices because nuclear is constant. It outputs every hour of everyday across their plants. Wind and solar are intermittent. If we legally cap wind energy at 5c/kWh, it works great while the wind blows. But the second the wind stops, we still have to buy expensive natural gas to keep the lights on. A price cap on renewables doesn’t make the gas any cheaper, it just means the state or the consumer has to pay the massive difference anyway. France doesn't have that problem because their baseline isn't weather-dependent.

Whether the rule is ridiculous or not, the point stands that it is an EU requirement. We literally do not have the legal autonomy to "legislate it away" on our own. You specifically said to stop blaming the EU for a system that is mandated by them.

As for infrastructure, developers are actually queuing up to build here precisely because the pricing system makes it profitable. The lack of progress isn't a lack of interest. it's our own broken planning system and an outdated grid network. Scraping marginal pricing wouldn't fix planning delays, it would just ensure those investors pack up and leave. If you want the state to build it all instead, that's a fair argument, but it means our taxes or bills would have to increase upfront to fund it.

I'll leave it there as I'm just derailing the thread. Moved away from actually talking about switching etc

Also, some suppliers have no minimum contract eg Waterpower

They're also regularly much cheaper than the alternatives... Very hard to get on their books as a customer though

What I mean is that if you sign up for the best available plan and the prices change in a few weeks time, the break fee is €50. If you sign up to a plan today and pay attention to the market, worst case scenario, you're down €50 to switch.

You've likely been paying over the odds for months. I'd advise to sign up to the best available plan today, you'll like save that €50 pretty quickly.