Electricity Prices Ireland September 2011

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

Last month we did a price comparison between the 3 main electricity suppliers in Ireland
and found that ESB Electric Ireland was the cheapest of the 3 suppliers and Board
Gais was the dearest. There was more talk in the news recently about a hike in
electricity prices by Airtricity starting in September so we decided to carry
out another price comparison on electricity prices in Ireland (well we help to
compare prices for tradesmen and mobile phone plans so why not help you save money on electricity as well!:)). Like last month we based our calculations on the standard rate for each supplier. There are many different prices and although we show only 2 categories in our comparison, the differences were very much the same for all categories. Therefore the most expensive provider in the standard category turns out to be the most expensive
in all of the other categories that we investigated as well.

Table 1

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

Table 2

As you can see in Table 2 the standing charges are very similar
for all 3 suppliers but Airtricity 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 Airtricity is the most expensive in our September 2011
comparison costing up to €27 more than ESB Electric for 1200 units of electricity
for 2 months which works out at about €162 per annum. You will save €27 if you
swich to ESB Electric this month but I’m sure ESB Electric will put up their prices
next month. There is only €3 of a difference between Board Gais and Airtricity
for 600 units or 1200units. There seems to be little effort made on behalf of
either of them to be competitive. It is important 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. For example
you can save up to 14% with ESB Electric where prices fall from 16cent incl VAT
to 14.60cent incl VAT with online billing and direct debit. On the examples above
you can save up to €180 per annum by switching to direct debit and online billing
so don’t delay switch today:)

If anyone has any comments or questions or if you disagree with anything I have said please feel free to submit it below.   To bookmark this page press CTRL+D in Internet Explorer or Firefox and I’ll do another price comparison next month.  Please tweet or share this article if you found it useful.

See you soon!

Cheers
Oliver Dempsey

Tradesmen.ie

References

Data for this article was obtained from the following official websites:-
https://www.esbelectricireland.ie/switchchange/allPricePlansElec.htm#five

http://www.airtricity.com/ie/home/products/current-offers/electricity/home-electricity-saver/

http://www.bordgaisenergy.ie/help-and-questions/home/electricity/price-change/?flash=1

E&OE.  Oliver Dempsey and Tradesmen.ie are not affiliated with any of these companies.  Prices were taken from the supplier websites on 23 August 2011.