If you’ve switched from oil to natural gas recently, you should be feeling pleased with yourself.
Since I last looked at the annual cost of centrally heating a house, the gap between the price of the two fuels has widened from £75 to £155. This is largely due to an increase in the price of oil but there is another factor at work. I have carried out some calculations u...
Should you take the opportunity to fix the price of your electricity tariff? The option is there thanks to Budget Energy. Their Keypad Budget Advantage deal allows customers who pre pay their power bills the chance to lock down the unit rate for a year.
For households using an average amount of electricity, when you factor in the cost of the standing charge, the effec...
A reliable electricity system based almost wholly on renewables is not just a lot of hot air, it’s a lot of cold air.
UK based Highview Power’s solution to the intermittency of green sources of power is cryogenic technology relying on chilled air.
Using off peak energy, air is turned into liquid at close to minus 200 degrees centigrade and stored until it’s neede...
What is the cheapest way to heat your home? I’ve been comparing four fuels which over the years have been commonly used for central heating.
The current league leader by a small margin is coal in the form of anthracite grains or beans which can been loaded into a gravity fed boiler. This fuel is not nearly as popular as it used to be but some homes still use it.
Of far more in...
Click Energy emerges as the greenest domestic supplier in Northern Ireland. Each megawatt hour of power it supplies has 115 kg of carbon content. Second is SSE Airtricity with a carbon content of 295kg
Suppliers have been able to offer less environmentally damaging power because of changes in the sources of energy used for generation
Fossil fuels such as coal and...
Wholesale energy prices here fell by nearly 18% in February as increased imports into the UK of LNG combined with mild weather continued to push prices downwards. However, the Vayu Energy Report shows that despite this substantial drop wholesale prices are still well up on a year ago.
Vayu Senior Energy Analyst, Keith Donnelly said: “We are continuing to see...
Since it first became clear that the wholesale price of electricity had markedly shifted upwards, explanations have been offered to explain the change.
Just to recap: the wholesale cost of power has been around £30 a MWh or 3 pence a kWh for many months. But in recent weeks it has jumped to £50 and even £60 a MWh hour. That’s the load weighted average price over an entire t...
For those who keep an eye on the cost of energy, recent developments in the wholesale markets have raised a few eyebrows. Oil, gas and now electricity have been rising sharply in price.
For much of this year the wholesale price* of a unit of electricity remained around three pence but at the start of this month it climbed to four pence and then further upwards until by the ...
Despite an expanding renewables energy sector, total energy related emissions of carbon dioxide in the Irish Republic rose last year by almost four per cent compared with the previous year. In the UK emissions fell by just under three per cent. There is no separate figure for Northern Ireland.
Across the EU as a whole the EU statistics agency Eurostat estimates that carbon dioxide e...
A steady stream of imported LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) helped drive the firmus energy index down by four per cent which now stands at 87.
The cost of oil, which has been seesawing since the start of the year, eased by just one per cent. It appears the recovery in prices from ...
The cost of gas, which is the main fuel used by power stations, has dropped year on year by about 20%. So why is the price of electricity coming down by just 5% as evidenced by the Budget Energy announcement?
Put plainly, wholesale fuel costs are a significant component of the bills consumers pay but they are not as important as many people might imagine.
A report publis...
Budget Energy has emerged on top in a customer satisfaction survey conducted by consumer organisation Which.
The North West based electricity supplier scored 61 points, significantly ahead of its rivals.
Gas supplier Firmus came second with 53 followed by SSE Airtricity on 51 and Power NI on 48.
The figures were based on customers’ overall satisfaction combined wit...
