Electricity Price Comparison Ireland October 2011

For the last few months we have being carrying out a price comparison between
the 3 elecricity supply companies. The ESB is the last to announce a price increase
from October 1st 2011. At the time of writing they had not published their rates
but their announcement included the following text, “All customers, irrespective
of their price plan, will see their bills increase by approximately 12%… All
customers will receive a detailed explanation of how the price increase affects
them with their bills in October and November.” On this basis we have revised
our price comparison below by adding 12% to all of the previous ESB prices and
displayed them below to give you a glimse of what it will look like on October
1st. As in previous months have 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.

Table 1 Comparison of price including vat per KwH for standard rate and
savings plans.

Table 2 As you can see in Table 2 Board Gais and ESB are identical and
Airtricity is slightly more expensive by by €3 due to it’s higher standing charge
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 October 2011
comparison but only by €3 or a 2 month period or €1.50 per month. The price
of Board Gais and the ESB will be identical if this 12% increase applies across
the board on all ESB tarrifs. With the current price difference between suppliers
it would not be worth your while to switch from any of them at present. However,
no matter 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.
On the examples above you can save up to €180 per annum by switching to direct
debit and online billing so make sure to make that switch if you haven’t done so already.  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 update this if prices change at any stage. Please tweet or
share this article if you found it useful.

You can see our article on how to save electricity costs using insulation and other smart energy ideas here.

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
(ESB increase announcement here)

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

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 26 September 2011.