Energy suppliers don’t always get it right, and there can be some pretty big discrepancies between what you use and what they say. How one journalist’s struggles with utility rates led to the complexities of energy comparison, and why you can be glad the Australian government has a tool to help.
We’re all getting screwed. That may seem quite direct, but if you’re paying for electricity and you haven’t switched providers or checked out your own electricity usage beyond simply receiving and paying the bill several times in the past year, you are probably being taken for a ride. If you have solar, the problem might still be there, as energy suppliers don’t appear to always (or ever) have customer interests at heart.
Simply receiving and paying seems to be the mode many of us are actively in.
It’s electricity. How can you contest it? The usage must be right, because the metres are being checked and tallied with maths and data and watts and kilowatt hours and conversions and it all probably goes way above your head, right?
Unfortunately, there’s more going on.
There’s also the possibility that your Australian energy provider is slapping you with a little more charge thanks to an extra kilowatt hour of use during the warmer and colder months, a demand charge you may not have thought about, and one of the benefits or features of being on one of the more commonly found “low-cost” plans rolled out to customers.
Or it might be that your solar is being sold while you’re being charged the full rate, a little like double dipping for the energy you’re providing.
Maybe you’re just being charged more than you should be.
On the hunt for lower energy prices
There certainly seem to be any number of ways for energy retailers to make more money from you, while you search and scour the web for the best low-cost plan.
On the surface, the idea of a low-cost plan certainly seems like a winner. After all, electricity is an expensive necessity.
You don’t really have a choice but to pay for electricity, so paying less always sounds better. The government’s rebate helps a bit, so why not go the extra mile and finish the job with a low cost option.
The problem is it might only get you some of the way there, with electrical pricing a big issue for all, especially those not doing the research. Worse, a so-called low-cost plan could end up costing you big if you don’t read the terms and change your energy consumption habits alongside.
The real price of a low cost plan
These days, just about every energy reseller offers a “low-cost” electricity plan, and at first glance, they certainly seem lower cost than the plan you might have been on before.
If you’re on one of the older grandfathered plans where the price has seemingly bumped up, there might even be a note in your current bill that you can save money with one of the new plans.
Why you haven’t been switched to it or told with a phone call is a good question — our guess is that there’s more money to be made from you — but a so-called lower cost option will be nudged your way at times. In your bill, in the emails, in an SMS, and when you eventually call the energy company to ask why it seems like your energy plan is so damn expensive.
Low-cost plans offer a slightly less expensive price at times of the year, but when demand is expected to creep up — such as when air conditioner use rises with the warmer and colder months — the price becomes more costly. It means that on the surface, a lower cost plan often marketed as being a “flexible” plan can save money some months, but increase it in others.
Frustratingly, those more expensive days appear to outnumber the less expensive ones. It’s very much a situation where you definitely need to read the terms and conditions, and apply the numbers and calculations to your situation.
The problem with this is that running numbers takes time, an understanding of calculations and possibly spreadsheets, and also the knowledge for how your electricity is set up. It’s a big thing to go through and, importantly, a pain in the proverbial.
Your home’s electricity explained
Depending on how your house is set up, you’ll have several parts to your electricity usage and its subsequent plan.
You’ll definitely have electricity, but you also might have gas. You might have a controlled load electricity usage when the water heater gets its power overnight, or if you’re playful, potentially a home battery, too. You might even have solar and get some of what you make from energy in the sun back through a feed price, while the rest could be stored in a battery you might have, or consumed throughout the day. Maybe.
And depending on how much you use your electricity and how much you’ve tapered back, you may also find that literally nothing you’re doing is keeping the costs down.
The Australian government does provide a small rebate for the rising cost of electricity, but a $100 or $150 rebate is only so useful when electricity costs are always rising, and when it seems that also nothing you’re doing seems to make a dent.
Even with solar panels, your costs might be sky high.
You’ve tried it all.
AC off and swelter through the heat.
Cold showers to stay cool.
Heating off and rug up.
Lights off in daylight and the TV off most other times.
Do more reading to avoid using electricity.
Small appliances, not the big oven.
Turn down the volume on any speakers in the house.
Opt for lower power gadgets at all times. Switch to low power lighting, too.
Low power everything. Use as little power as possible.
Scour the internet for keeps on keeping the power usage down.
The night comes, the dark has arrived, and you need to turn something on.
It’s time to make dinner, energy bills be damned.
You’ve tried it all and nothing seems to work.
That’s exactly what happened to this writer and his family.
With electricity and solar, he had tried to avoid costs and cut them in half.
We tried running big appliances during the day and conserving air conditioner usage so that it wouldn’t hit the bill too awkwardly, using the power of the sun so we wouldn’t have to use the power of the grid. We cut back on TV use where we could. We turned lights off that didn’t need to run. We rugged up in winter and avoided using the ducted AC, while also running it in short bursts to keep the house cool in summer.
We tried everything to cut electricity costs, because a thousand bucks nearly every quarter is not only not affordable or sustainable, it’s also not remotely realistic for what a family of two adults and two small children use.
And yet that appears to be the world we’re living in, where costs are seemingly up, and little you do appears to make a dent in lowering energy prices overall. The cost of living is up everywhere, and electricity is biting hard, too.
Fortunately, there’s data, where you can dive in and see if your electricity company is making a mess of reality and charging you more. It’s not easy, but it’s there, and you may be able to prove the electricity companies wrong.
Real appliances, unreal usage
In this writer’s house, there are a reasonable amount of gadgets, as you can probably imagine. He runs an award-winning technology website, so things will be tested and electricity will be used.
But he is also acutely aware how much energy costs, and can run the numbers to get the best usage.
Some things run all the time and the electricity metre just seems to keep ticking.
You can’t turn off the fridge or the modem, and there’s a NAS drive always plugged in, too, typically sitting idle and consuming scant amounts of power. Lights are used when they’re needed and switched off when they aren’t, and there’s probably a speaker or two that is playing somewhere in the house regularly, as well.
But there is also a curious abundance of awareness in this household to make sure electricity isn’t used, and it may be the same in yours. The eight year old is eco-aware and makes sure unnecessary lights aren’t switched on at all times, while the appliances that we do have tend to be fairly energy friendly.
And yet the bills stay high. Every quarter, an envelope is opened and someone nearly faints, before feeling frustrated and powerless.
Reading your bill is difficult enough at the best of times, but learning from it and trying to keep costs down seems impossible, too.
It doesn’t matter how many lights you turn on and off, the bills always stay high. Day and night, you feel like you’re stuck. Nothing seems to work, and no amount of running the appliances when solar is available makes the difference.
Start with the data from your supplier
You have one option: request your data. Your energy supplier can show you their data, but that will only show you what you already know — your bill is expensive, and here are the days you used a lot of power, purportedly, anyway.
Much like how the NBN will never call you because they’re not your Internet company but rather the supplier of the services to your Internet company, your energy provider is also not likely the supplier either.
In the part of Sydney where this journalist works, the energy supplier is Ausgrid, while the energy provider and reseller he used to start this story was Energy Australia. It’s a little like how NBN Co runs the nationwide broadband in this country, and you don’t buy internet access from them, but rather Telstra, Optus, Mate, Exetel, Aussie Broadband, and so on and so on.
(Also note the past tense of the last paragraph: was. That’ll come into play later on.)
Depending on where you live, your energy supplier could be someone else, and they have the data you need. The problem is it’s not always in a remotely useable format.
Request the data, provide your details, and within a few days, you’ll be granted access to your power information for a set of time, possibly in a spreadsheet that makes little to no sense. If you have the right information and work at the electricity supplier, there’s a good chance there’s a computer terminal that does make sense of this data.
But here at home as just a regular consumer, it’s a bunch of numbers and header-less sheets, with you — the general consumer — left to fend for yourself. We wouldn’t blame anyone if they decided to give up. We suspect that’s kind of the point.
Energy suppliers are required to give you the information, but they don’t have to give it to you with instructions.
Make things difficult and people become complacent. You can’t really move forward unless you know what is going on.
Breaking things down — and getting to know your energy usage
Break it down, however, and you might see how your data is really lining up.
For instance, in the Ausgrid data export, there’s a regular listing of your National Meter Identifier (NMI) and for this journalist, four sets of the same dates. That’s a suggestion that we’re using four sets of power, or are configured to, anyway.
There are at least 96 columns of data for each date, and yet no information explaining what any of it means. Each one clearly represents a time, so how do you work what’s going on? How do you interpret the number “96” for your regular day?
Take a 24 hour day and divide by 96.
Imagine a clock, but instead of twenty four sections for each hour of the day, you have 96 segments for each 15 minutes of the day. Start at midnight and move up the chain, and you’ll have a full list of a day’s sense of power to work from.
That’s important because you can work out the numbers yourself, and because not every energy retailer works from the same logic. For instance, some energy retailers use five minute increments to track energy usage, while others track changes hourly or half-hourly. Energy Australia’s data exports use hourly tracking, but we’ve also heard from their support team that 30 minute tracking may also be used internally, dependent on when the data is checked.
It means your source of truth can be the 15 minute power demand increments supplied by your electricity supplier provided you know what you’re calculating to, and the company you pay electricity for needs to somehow match the energy usage in question. Four lots of 15 equal an hour, so you should be able to match the usage accordingly.
Doing this is a bit of a mess, and a reason why people can give up, which again is probably the point. But there’s another way to get your power test working well, though it can be a touch uncomfortable.
Switch everything off with an isolation test
An “isolation test” is a test electrical engineers use when they’re trying to work out where problems are by shutting off components and isolating them from the whole.
You can’t quite do the same thing in your home, clearly. You can’t turn off parts of your electricity and segregate sections, even if you can turn off appliances. You’re probably not an electrician, so you only have so much control.
But imagine if your house wasn’t communicating the right electricity information to your electrical provider. In this hypothetical, your house would be the small electrical component that needs to be segregated. For that, you can turn off your home’s power for a short time to see what the energy tracking showed.
Energy companies will typically show metre readings one or two days after the fact, so look out for the data then. But if your isolation test data doesn’t line up, you have a data point you can talk to the electricity company about.
Ultimately, if you’re wondering whether the energy company is doing you wrong, you can get the power back by cutting off the power for a few hours. It’s a little uncomfortable, truth be told, so consider doing it on a day when you’re conveniently not there.
Data could compel you to switch
In truth, there are loads of data points, more than a simple isolation test, but the problem is you have to go through that massive spreadsheet of data from your energy supplier, and possibly a few others.
By the time we had finished our analysis, we had spreadsheets from the energy supplier, energy reseller, and the solar power plant on the side of the house.
It’s a lot of numbers and a lot of time, an amount of time that we probably should have spent under the sun gathering our own solar energy and vitamin D, rather than simply sitting inside like another appliance.
But in the end, the data appeared to mostly line up:
The problem was the isolation test; by Energy Australia’s own data, our isolation test didn’t make any sense, and arrived at a different time on its systems than when we had run it and for a different length. There’s an issue somewhere, but we’re not finding it.
Not content with the unexplainable high bills and a problem with the isolation test data, we made the jump to a different energy reseller, where we encountered a totally different new data set: near identical real world usage, but much lower weekly energy outputs.
Interestingly, Energy Australia’s internal support team confirmed the approach, noting that the usage should provide similar results. It did not, suggesting something else was going on.
It’s impossible to compare energy usage in a like-for-like way week on week, because you’re using your energy differently every day. One day is never going to be the same as another, so you only have your habits to go by. If you have solar, you’ll never be able to recreate the solar usage on some days versus others. There are too many variables.
But if your habits haven’t changed and your electricity usage appears very different between providers, something is clearly wrong. We’re not talking about prices, either, but rather kilowatt usage, which should remain consistent across providers and resellers.
In our situation, we suspect the discrepancy could be from solar.
Specifically, the difference is that our new energy supplier (Momentum) appears to be letting us use our solar energy throughout the day, while our old one (Energy Australia) initially did, and than after a forced plan change (the old plan was retired, but we were left on it), the solar usage didn’t pan out in quite the same way.
We’re not entirely sure why, but some of this data from the solar power plant connected to our side of the house seems to match this problem and suggests the solar is the discrepancy between the excess usage being used, even if it’s yet more frustrating amounts of data to go through.
Even beyond this discrepancy, the one obvious reason to consider switching is saving money.
The simple truth about the overly complex world of electricity in Australia is that not every energy provider is going to give you the best deal. Many simply won’t.
Some energy retailers appear to be primed to intentionally overcharge, such as how AGL uses estimations to charge customers while WA’s Synergy has been accused of overcharging, as well. In 2022, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis noted that Australians have been consistently overcharged by energy retailers for years. You may have long suspected this, but had no idea what to do.
As a consumer, your options are to be complacent and keep paying, or find the data to back you up and put your money where your mouth is.
When it comes to that last one, your best choice is to compare your options.
Energy comparison made easy
If comparing data and costs seems like a lot of work — and after spending several hours staring into the abyss of spreadsheets and maths, it definitely can be — rest assured that the government has something you can use. It’s not perfect, but it’s a huge help.
You can complain about government initiatives until you’re blue in the face, or even write a column on some of the sillier ones that clearly need more expert advice, but one of the better initiatives is Energy Made Easy, a government website designed to let you compare electricity plans based on your actual usage.
This isn’t like a Canstar, Finder, or any of the other financial comparison sites that make money on affiliated companies, something this journalist knows only too well after working at one of those. While commercial financial comparison sites typically make their money by hoping you spend money on a company they have a commercial arrangement with in a list of suggestions, the government’s Energy Made Easy isn’t trying to push you to one or the other.
Simply enter the NMI for your home, and get started comparing the rough usage applied with other details. You’ll be able to break down the costs on whether you want fixed costs or costs that change based on the hour of the day, and even see how much solar feed pricing varies.
If you don’t have your NMI code, you can simply throw in your postcode and get cracking that way, kickstarting the research without any commercial interference.
Tips to stay on top of electricity pricing
It’s worth noting that simply switching to a new energy retailer may not resolve the overcharging, but it should provide some sort of result that improves things considerably. Importantly, it’ll give you the information to understand what’s happening at the next potential retailer you find yourself paying.
Switching energy retailers is one starting point. Researching the best energy supplier and comparing it against your usage is another.
In the months since this investigation started, readers have reached out to Pickr to ask whether they could be overcharged by their provider. They have solar, they haven’t a battery, and yet the costs keep going higher. They’ve been doing everything to cut back, and yet the prices stay up. What can they do?
Here are three things worth doing ASAP.
1. Research your energy usage and check your plan
The first thing any decent investigation needs is data, and since you’re the person checking out your home’s energy usage, it’s time to research your data usage.
Check your energy usage with your current retailer. Many don’t have a fantastic export system — EnergyAustralia, we’re looking at you — but others support spreadsheet exports well.
However, you can also find your local energy supplier and request the data to compare it against. It should line up, but if it doesn’t, you may have a problem at one end.
If your bill is estimated, it should say it on the bill you receive. However, if it’s a direct read and the energy amounts don’t line up, it’s time to consider whether something is faulty, and to call in to your energy reseller, possibly after doing one of those aforementioned isolation tests.
It’s advice shared in the industry, with consumer advocated group Energy Consumers Australia noting that checking whether your energy plan is the best for you is an important way to take control of an energy bill.
2. Change to a monthly plan
Checking your energy usage is critical even when you switch to a new company. Nothing takes the place for regular checks, and making sure your retailer isn’t taking you for a fool.
But energy companies don’t always make it easy because that could make you leave. Charging you in quarters is one way electricity companies make it difficult for you to challenge the information.
While quarterly billing isn’t necessarily for preventing electricity comparison — it likely makes the energy company more money due to charging more at once — the fact that you can’t properly compare your electricity usage easily until after three months certainly makes research more difficult.
So if you’re stuck in this quagmire, talk to your electricity company and ask to switch to a monthly bill.
Comparing electricity usage over a period of a month makes it possible to actually find out whether your habits are changing.
Some electricity companies will not support the move, and will just outright deny it if you ask. This despite the Australian Energy Regulator noting that energy retailers are required to offer flexible payment options.
If your current retailer refuses, you probably already know they’re doing something potentially wrong, and it might be time to move. Possibly before dropping in a complaint with the energy ombudsman in your state.
3. Move to a new energy company
You can cut back on TV, air conditioning, and using the oven less frequently, but moving to a new energy company is possibly the best way of showing your old one that their approach isn’t working.
Like we do with broadband and phone connections, Australians have the ability to move to new providers of their services and utilities fairly freely. It may require a bit of research to land on the one you like best, but it ultimately sends a message and can save you money in the long run.
In the months since we started down this rabbit hole, we’ve heard from people who said “I’ve been with X company for so long” and “moving seems so difficult”.
Neither of these answers don’t really work as well as you might believe.
Staying with a brand because you’re loyal is a sort of relationship that should go both ways, but almost never does. You may be loyal to a brand, but they’re out to make money from you. In the end, that’s what matters to them: you spending money with them.
While loyalty taxes almost always hit in different categories, such as with mortgages, at least one state in Australia is looking to end the loyalty tax in relation to energy.
The other argument doesn’t hold water, either. Moving doesn’t take long, and is more or less just a phone call or internet form away.
You won’t even lose out on a day’s worth of internet, and in the end, you’ll have a new energy supplier and hopefully a smaller bill in the process. That’s the sort of thing we all want, and may mean never looking at a stupidly large impossible to comprehend energy spreadsheet ever again.
