So, moving place in a week and I notice there's a whole bunch of different electric companies wanting business. Any tips on the cheapest?

im with origin, but i pay an extra $10 a month to use (some/more?) green energy.

http://www.qca.org.au/comparator/

if u want electrical work ill do it and undercut acetame by 10bucks an hour

I want a central splitter and a new line run from the street at my place exis & acetame hasn't got back to me yet. FIGHT FOR MY LOVE.

I don't need electrical work, I'm just asking about electricity providers.

just follow orbitor's link.
they're all the friggin same, really.

yah i am on the cheapest (agl) according to that comparitor, but the others are so close it's not worth worrying about. strange too how when i compare with some bills from years back the price has risen dramatically... coz we were told that competition will make the price drop, right!? haha asif.

coz we were told that competition will make the price drop, right

Nah as always they actually said it would make the price drop relative to what it would have been without competition.

And it's more expensive cause coal, gas, oil, etc. have risen dramatically in price, labour and raw materials costs to build & maintain power stations and power lines have increased massively, and we've discovered we need to spend billions to replace and upgrade old s***ty grid assets which were neglected for years previously by Energex.

plus we probably have the overheads of all their s***ty advertising spam as they madly try to get us to switch.

is there any benefit to having both gas, hot water and electricity with the same company?

gas, hot water and electricity

Wouldn't your hot water be gas or electric?

anyway, I think you get 5% discount if you have both? We get a 'free' mmagazine every month cause we stayed with one of them. Shame it's Women's Weekly :(

but how could buying power through a middleman ever be cheaper than buying power directly from the generator? they might be able to under-cut other middlemen... but they can't under-cut what they themselves pay the generator for power so it has to be more expensive to go through more hands.

Easily.

You could go and purchase your power from the wholesale market. But then how are you going to transport it to where you use it? You'd have to pay the transmission grid company, and then the distribution grid company. What about all your metering? Your billing? How much negotiation power do you think a single household has?

Then there are the risks. Who will give you price protection against wholesale price increase? The wholesale price can and does go as high as $10,000/MWh which is 71 times the retail price we pay.

Big retailers have massive purchasing power. They procure hedging contracts with generators to protect themselves from price spikes. They are then able to get transmission and distribution prices massively lower than what a single entity could. To further protect themselves against high prices, they even build their own peaking generators to cover their exposure if need be.

Even big industrial loads (30MW+) often don't purchase directly from generators as the risks are high and the price paid in the end not a lot lower.

Energex don't generate electricity in QLD, they just distribute it. Tarong Energy and other such companies are the ones that produce the meggiwhatts.

Wouldn't your hot water be gas or electric?

not if you're in a body corporate building, most of the time its central hot water and they will ASS RAPE you with ridiculously expensive hot water bills

http://www.amerheritage.com/merchimages/gourmet/winethings/2571.jpg

Wouldn't your hot water be gas or electric?

Its gas. Except its a separate account, you don't pay by how much gas it uses only how much water you use. They also charge an arm and a leg for it. Electric would be a fair bit cheaper for me, i think.

but how could buying power through a middleman ever be cheaper than buying power directly from the generator? they might be able to under-cut other middlemen... but they can't under-cut what they themselves pay the generator for power so it has to be more expensive to go through more hands.

when there was no competition in the retail electricity industry in QLD you still weren't buying electricity straight from the generator, there was simply a monopoly in the retail market.

introducing competition into the market increases efficiency, (reducing or eliminating rent seeking behavior), which in turn means lower (relatively) prices for consumers. it also means more choice for consumers.

edit: lulz

last edited by taggs at 16:18:18 26/Aug/08

i know households never bought power directly from the generator... but we used to just pay state govt who owned the generators, distribution & the lot. my old man worked for SEAQ (southern electrical authority of queensland) & it was the whole she-bang. it later split into SEQEB (south east queensland electricty board) as distributers & QEGB (queensland electricity generation board) as the generators, both still govt owned & run. energex came from SEQEB. it was a monopoly of sorts... being a govt essential service n personally i would have preferred it stay that way. what do we even have a govt for if it isn't to provide essential services!?

can't wait for this theoretical time where power becomes cheaper (relative to some unprovable imaginary point) but i won't hold my breathe ;p

well i haven't really looked into it but i'm fairly sure that distribution is still largely under the control of the government and the retail and generation sectors are pretty regulated.

breaking up the state owned monopolies is only part of the picture. basically, the national competition policy aims to create a nation-wide market for wholesale electricity and a national electricity grid. that would vastly reduce the inefficiencies present in the old system where each state generated, distributed and sold electricity to consumers independently and through state run monopolies.

last edited by taggs at 17:04:48 26/Aug/08

introducing competition into the market increases efficiency, (reducing or eliminating rent seeking behavior), which in turn means lower (relatively) prices for consumers. it also means more choice for consumers.

i'm sure thats great in theory, but to me it sounds more like its just added duplication. plus service has gone down hill.

the real push for privitisation i think is more to free more capital to throw at big infrastructure projects than anything else.