Electricity 4.8% price rise may not happen in October

Alan Bates said that the States pandemic recovery plan might affect when it does happen.

A rise of 4.8% to recover uncontrolled historic costs was due for April this year but was put on hold until October due to the virus pandemic.

‘That’s not set in stone yet,’ said Mr Bates.

‘The timing is still under discussion with the regulators.’

Due to regulatory control, GE has not been able to put up its base tariff for almost a decade: ‘For the last eight years we’ve had no underlying tariff increase,’ said Mr Bates.

There was a 6.8% rise in prices last year, but that was to recover two years of uncontrollable costs.

This sort of ‘shock rise’ is not something the company wants to do, however, and Mr Bates said ideally it would prefer to have small, perhaps annual, rises.

Mr Bates hopes that in future it will be able to introduce more flexible tariffs. ‘Our tariffs were designed in the 1990s, for diesel generation, but our tariffs now have to reflect the power agreement we have with France.

‘We need to restructure our tariffs to provide information to the market that’s not misleading in terms of how much it costs per kilowatt-hour of electricity, and how much does it cost to have electricity delivered to your house.

‘We think there’s a much more sensible approach to tariff evaluation than what we have seen in the last few years.’

Among the ideas he said might be looked at could be making it cheaper to use electricity at weekends.

Another idea would be letting people with electric vehicles make use of unused battery power at the end of the day to, for instance, heat their home’s water during the evening. The car could then be left on charge overnight for use the following day.

Work is already under way to allow for more flexible tariffs to be introduced, with changes being made to the company’s billing system: ‘It would be lovely to have it working on 1 January next year,’ said Mr Bates.

One of the propositions attached to the energy policy and approved by the States should see Economic Development reporting later this year on ‘a review of structures for cost-reflective tariffs’.

GE has also been charged to prepare a business case on installing a direct cable link to France, and Mr Bates said GE wanted this completed and back before the States this year.

Answering a comment made during the energy debate that GE was ‘anti-competitive’, Mr Bates said it was not blocking entry into the market: ‘What we are not doing is allowing people to come in and potentially disrupt and corrupt the market,’ he said.

‘We are States-owned and completely focused on doing the right thing for the island.’