Electricity Prices Ireland July 2011

(Oct 2011, prices have changed, please see latest electricity price comparison here)

With all the talk in the news last week about a hike in electricity prices
we decided to carry out our own price comparison on electricity prices in Ireland
(well we help to compare prices for tradesmen so why not help you save money
on electricity as well!:)). We wanted to see what the price difference was between
the 3 main suppliers to the Irish market i.e. ESB Electric Ireland, Airtricity
and Board Gais. We based our calculations on the standard rate for each supplier.
There are many different tariffs and although we show only 2 categories in our
comparison, the differences were pretty much the same for all categories. Therefore
the most expensive supplier in the standard category turned out to be the most
expensive in all of the other categories that we looked at as well.

Table 1

As you can see in table 1 Board Gais is the most expensive on both Standard
and Saving plans at almost 2cent per unit higher than both ESB Electric and
Board Gais on the Standard tarriff.

Table 2

As you can see in Table 2 the standing charges are very similar for all 3 suppliers
but Board Gais works out the most expensive in all the examples above.

Table 3

Table 3 is a summary of the information in Table 1 and Table
2. Again it shows that Board Gais is the most expensive in our July 2011 comparison
(ok August 1st) costing up to €24 more than ESB Electric and Airtricity for 1200
units of electricity for 2 months which works out at about €144 per annum. ESB Electric is 2 to 3 euro cheaper than Airtricity according to our calculations above which probably isn’t enough to make you want to switch but if you are with Board Gais it looks like you’d be better off to switch to one of the others.

It is important also to make the point that nomatter
which provider you are with that you should switch to direct debit and online
billing (ebill) to avail of the maximum savings from all suppliers. You can save
up to 14% per annum using ebill and direct debit with Airtricity (price reduces
to 13.77 cent per unit) and up to 14.25% with ESB Electric (price reduces to 3.72
cent per unit). On the examples above you can save up to €180 per annum
by switching to direct debit and online billing.

Regards
Oliver Dempsey
Tradesmen.ie

E&OE. Prices were taken from the supplier websites on 15 July 2011.  If you have any comments to make please feel free to so below.

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