Electricity Retailers and Hiding Prices

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Yesterday in the blog, I described how Energy Australia was making it hard to find out the price of their electricity, and appeared to be deliberately hiding the actual price, concentrating on the savings if you went onto a contract. Well, I really did not realize how bad things were in the NSW Electricity Retail Industry.

Here in NSW we have an Interdependent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal that governs the regulated pricing of electricity if you choose a regulated pricing of electricity, and and appears to also govern access to pricing information for residential and small retail customers.

On their helpful Web Site, IPART have released an obscure document titled ‘Retail Price Disclosure Guidelines For Retail suppliers of small retail customers’. This document is so obscure that even when I knew it was there and went back looking for it the day after finding it initially, it took a good five minutes to find. This is an interesting document, and at the start makes the following comment

The purpose of this Guideline is to specify the pricing information that a retail supplier is required to publish, provide in writing to any person on request, and provide to IPART to improve price transparency for customers and to enable the establishment and ongoing operation of a price comparison service.

and

A small retail customer should be able to identify any currently available energy offers applicable to their circumstances. Small retail customers should be able to access this information from the retail supplier directly or via the online price comparison service or complementary telephone service.

Seems fairly straight forward to me. IPART considers that for transparency that small retail customers.

Now, lets go into a bit more detail as to what retailers are required to supply.

A retail supplier must publish on its internet site the pricing information for all of that retail supplier’s currently available energy offers. The pricing information for each energy offer currently available at the commencement of this Guideline must be published:

  1. by no later than 31 July 2010; and
  2. in a single document available on the retail supplier’s internet site; or
  3. on a single web page on the retail supplier’s internet site.

 

And

The home page of a retail supplier’s internet site must have a link that allows a person to access the retail supplier’s pricing information easily, logically and free of charge.

What this means is that there must be a SINGLE DOCUMENT that you can logically find on each retail suppliers web site that shows the pricing of ALL their retail offerings. The document also describes that this MUST be kept up to date. Sounds really simple doesn’t it? Let’s see how the retailers go with this.

Energy Australia – TRUenergy

As noted on yesterdays blog, the information is not easily available on their home page as required. To get to any information, you need to go to the very bottom of the page and click on ‘Conditions and Pricing‘. This then gives a link for ‘Retail Customers’ or ‘Small Business Customers’ which for some reason go to the same page, and then ask you to enter your postcode and if you are a retail or a small business customer. Entering this information provides a link to a number of documents describing their prices.

At time of writing, they do not appear to have one document that describes all their prices.

Origin Energy (Formerly Integral)

I had expected this to be slightly better, And they were. But they were not perfect. The first thing is that it was split between Business and ‘home’. For ‘home’, you needed to select ‘pricing’ then ‘energy fact sheets’ to get a list of all the electricity offers in PDF, but not in one page. They list their plans as ‘Standing’, ‘Daily Saver’, ‘Flexi Choice’ and ‘Rate Freeze’. Conveniently, they do provide a link for ‘NSW Pricing Tariffs’. However rather than the single page that describes ALL retail offers, it only includes the regulated offers.

It also describes the areas for each offer as being ‘AusGrid’, ‘Endeavour Energy’, and ‘Essential Energy’ without describing where these are. [Note to self – find a postcode listing of coverage for each of the above].

The Business Pricing page is not as good unfortunately. It mostly provides PDF links to each of the offers, rather than having them all on the one page. Compared to Energy Australia this is much better, but still not what is required.

Country Energy (Origin)

Believe it or not, Country Energy is better and worse than the others. As soon as you go to their site and say ‘Residential‘ or ‘Business‘, they provide a link to their pricing.

However, their linked document says that the prices only apply within the ‘Essential Energy’ area, and do not give any details of other plans that they might have. The problem is, as far as I can work out, they operate in NSW, Victoria and South Australia, but do not provide any pricing for these areas.

Other Suppliers

The compliance of other suppliers was variable. Some were better than others.