38 Degrees and Which are working together to collect 200,000 signatures on the Big Switch petition.
You can sign it without committing yourself to anything. All a signature says is that you support 38 Degrees and Which in going to the Big Six Energy Companies to bargain with them, as one group, for a cheaper deal.
They need 200,000 people to sign the Big Switch petition before they go to the Energy companies.
If 38 Degrees and Which are successful in negotiating a lower price for gas and energy through the Big Switch, people who signed the petition will then be able to decide whether or not to sign up to the 38 Degrees/Which new lower-price gas and electricity deals.
A scheme like this has already worked in the Netherlands. 38 Degrees say that if they can make this BIg Switch deal work for a price reduction, they’ll then be in a position to make other deals with the big energy companies – such as requiring them to increase the amount of renewable energy they generate etc.
Silly tariffs
It would be good if they could work out a more sensible price structure too, as well as reducing the cost of energy. At the moment, people in fuel poverty, and others who use small amounts of energy, pay high prices per unit of energy they use, while people who use a lot of energy pay lower prices per unit of energy. This creates a perverse incentive to use more energy, since the price tariff is higher for low rates of energy use, and lower for higher rates of energy use. Daft or what?
Sensible tariffs
Apart from Cooperative Energy, which has a single tariff regardless of the amount of energy a customer uses, Ebico is the only UK energy company I know about that sells electricity and gas at the same rate per unit to all customers within a given region.
