LBC caller says he will 'go hungry' this winter as energy bills go up
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With the energy price cap for October set to reach over £3,500, industry regulator Ofgem announced on Friday, millions of households could fall into fuel poverty. And with that price cap expected to rise again to £5,000 in January according to some estimates, and then worryingly £6,500 in April, households will likely want to know every trick in the book to prevent them from forking out the maximum amount of cash to pay their energy bills.
With an energy company like Utilita, which has committed to offering cheaper energy than the “Big Six” companies, households may be able to swerve the full extent of the crisis.
Utilita’s boss Bill Bullen explained: “Energy bills are made up of two key things. One is consumption, the other is price.
“There is very little we can do about price at the moment, but the question is what we can do about consumption.”
It comes as the spiralling global gas costs have hiked up the price of energy for both suppliers and consumers.
But Utilita offers its customers ways to slash bills by helping them to reduce their energy consumption with a range of technologies that can guide decisions made at home.
Mr Bullen explained: “There is a lot of technology we have been looking at, in particular disaggregating smart metre data.
“90 percent of our customers have smart metres and that means we can generate a huge amount of data by looking at appliance usage and inferring behaviours from that data.
“We can play that back to people through our app. There are a couple of key features on our app such as a smart score, which enables people to look at their carbon footprint versus similar households and that comes from the data that we are getting from their smart metre.
“The higher the energy prices are, the more valuable the savings are and the reality is that what people do not know about, they are not going to manage, so by making information available via the app it is ready available to them in a convenient and they will take action based on it.
Utilita customers that take a three-star energy rating to a five-star energy rating with the Smart Score feature on the Smart App can save up to 27 percent on bills, Express.co.uk understands.
And anyone with access to the My Utilita app, which is around 600,000 people, can make these savings.
But this is not the only cost-cutting technique that Utilita is raising awareness about.
Teaming up with frozen food specialist Iceland, the “Shop Smart, Cook Savvy” initiative is based on new research from Utilita offers practical solutions and advice on how to save money in the kitchen.
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The research pinpoints cost-cutting cooking methods to help stretch household budgets, as well as pointing out which cooking appliances are the most energy-intensive and in turn expensive.
It revealed that electric cookers were the most expensive to run, with dual and gas cookers not far behind.
The firms claim that households reliant on oven cooking switching to more energy-efficient cooking methods such as air fryers and microwaves could save them up to £604 a year.
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