Norway, as with many other European countries has gone down the path of ‘deregulating’ the electricity supply industry. This means that instead of one company (traditionally a state monopoly) in your area maintaining the electricity supply grid and supplying the power you need to heat your home, the two parts of the business have been split.
The electricity grid is still a monopoly and the prices are determined by a commission. Looking at on-line calculators it looks like more than half of our electricity bill will go to the network maintainers. Thus the only opportunity for saving money therefore is to choose the cheapest supplier of electricity on your area. This is where the deregulation has had most effect. The result of this ‘enlightened’ policy (enlightened if you are a follower of ‘The Chicago Boys’) is that there are a bewildering choice of companies that will supply you with your electricity: these can be local, regional and national.
Each company offers at least three different tariffs:
1) Spot pris, varies per day
2) Standard variable, varies not per day but at most every 14 days
3) Fixed price, for up to three years.
It is almost as frustrating trying to choose a supplier of energy in Norway as it is to compare different mobile phone packages. There is no standard way to compare current and historical prices for energy per supplier. There is a website that is supposed to help, but there is always a disclaimer each time you do a search “this information may contain inaccuracies”. To use this website effectively you need to know how many units of energy you use each year. We have no idea how much electricity we are going to need in our new home so choosing our energy supplier is a case of inaccuracies compounded by guesswork.
Some energy suppliers websites give you the ‘bare’ price, others include various taxes that the government levies on each unit of electricity. In the last year spot prices have swung between 30 and 80 øre for a unit of electricity, the result of an unexpectedly harsh winter last year. See why making a choice can be quite important?
So what are we going to do – besides asking other people who they use? Put names of the companies in a hat and choose the first one we pull out? Do we gamble on another cold winter and go for a fixed price scheme? Or are prices going to drop significantly in the next three years?
This was one thing we were not prepared for, put simply it is bloody annoying. At least with a mobile phone plan you can buy pre-paid and just leave the thing turned off. This is not an option with your electricity supply.
The state monopoly is dead.
Long live post-chaos-theory-Chicago-Boys deregulation.
Kjenner igjen problemet. Selv bruker jeg norgesenergi.no til strøm og onecall.no til mobil, men det er så mange alternativer at jeg tror alle nordmenn føler det samme som dere.
Det samme gjelder bank, forsikring etc.
Ting var enklere før :o)
This may be a bit late in the conversation but it might be worth tracking use a bit more proactively – see http://www.taoma.co.uk/ for our tracking stats (a graph for usage today at our house). We keep them in a database and work out what deal works best for us on the basis of trends – I also get alerts if something has accidentally been left on, like the hot water heater.
Oooo gadgets!
You've just given us something else to do with those long dark winter nights: watch Jerry and his nearest and dearest use electricity :)
I don't know – having re-read your article, I can see that guessing how much strom (sic) you are pulling is a small part of the problem, the bigger part is getting the right tarrif. Here, I sometimes use it for remotely telling whether the TV and Wii are being over-used by the lad when I'm at work in town, or whether he's reading in bed after lights out. Sneaky, eh? The unit uses an inductance clamp around the mains wire leading to the fuse box – if you have 220v I guess it would work for you too. Here the power companies are giving them away for customers switching to specific products they are trying to push.
Heh Jerry, must be lunchtime in Newcastle ;)
Perhaps the biggest problem is that there is no mains gas, all appliances are electric. This of course means heating, cooking and hot water are all electric. I've already discovered that putting the immersion heater on a timer for three hours a night gives us more than enough hot water for a day. We've added timers to the two heaters that we expect to use the most.
We are planning to use wood for space heating, the flat has a built in wood burning stove, as people say wood is cheaper than electricity. We might ask the neighbours how many units of electricity they use. But this would only give us an indication of usage for us as one house has a family of four in it and the other an old lady who has already told us she doesn't like the cold :)