All SSE Airtricity customers will be given €35 credit to pay their bills as the company keeps its promise to forgo profits this year.
They began crediting nearly 250,000 peoples’ accounts yesterday in a move costing them more than €8.6 million. SSE Airtricity confirmed that they would redistribute any profits made this year back to consumers to help them navigate through the cost-of-living crisis.
Nikki Flanders, Managing Director of SSE Energy Customer Solutions said: "We’ve recently seen reductions in wholesale market prices however, they remain high compared to historic levels. Like most suppliers, we buy wholesale energy in advance to protect customers from short-term wholesale price shocks, like those we saw last year.
“The time it takes for wholesale market prices to feed through to customer bills depends on how far in advance we have bought energy. As we have done before, we remain committed to reducing our prices as soon as it is possible to do so.”
She added: “The €35 we are giving back today represents all of the profit we made as an energy supplier returned on customers’ bills; this means we have provided energy to customers during this difficult time ‘at cost’.
“Any customer who is experiencing financial difficulty or has concerns about their energy costs should contact us in confidence and we will do our best to support them.”
Meanwhile, two other electrical companies shocked their customers over separate billing blunders. Electrical Ireland mistakenly didn’t charge up to 11,000 of their consumers for months while Bord Gais Energy took two payments from theirs.
It is understood that the Commission for Regulation of Utilities has launched a probe into Electric Ireland for their failure to meet agreed billing period commitments. Michael Kilcoyne, who is the Chairperson of the Consumer Association of Ireland, said it wasn’t good enough.
Speaking to the Irish Mirror/Star yesterday, he said: “I want to know what steps they’re going to take so that it doesn’t happen again. Some of the only income their customers get might only be their pension.
"It’s just simply not good enough.” Michael Kilcoyne said he believes Electric Ireland customers should have their debt written off - while those with Bord Gais Energy should be given “free units of electricity” as a gesture of goodwill.
He added: “It’s really not acceptable, we can call it mistakes, we can call it whatever we want but it just shouldn’t have happened. These are big companies and they’re making huge profits .”
Sinn Fein TD Darren O’Rourke also slammed the blunders and said: “This is just the latest in a litany of bad news from energy companies and they’re running roughshod over ordinary customers.
“We have the highest electricity prices in Europe … and at the same time, we have energy companies recording record profits. It’s clear that the Government hasn’t got control of this.”
In a statement, Electric Ireland said they were “aware of a billing issue involving an incorrect discount rate being applied to some customers.” They added: “This has resulted in less than 1% of our electricity customers having their bill delayed.”
While Bord Gais Energy said their “banking partner has today confirmed that the customers who had a duplicate direct debit taken from their account in error should have had their accounts fully restored yesterday and overnight.
“Both AIB and Bord Gais Energy will continue to monitor the situation in case any delays are being experienced by customers. The company acted as swiftly as possible in conjunction with AIB to reverse the error and again apologises for any inconvenience that was caused.”
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