I complained to the energy regulator. The reply is why prices stay high.
A man stood at my door with my ESB bill in his hand and did the sums for me. That's what still gets me. It didn't feel like a sales call. It felt like that illusory "real life" maths that everyone says they didn't teach us in school. He had the figures, he showed his working, and I was mad to stay on my out of contract rate. So I "signed" the tablet.
The easy reading is that I was careless. I wasn't. The homework was done for me, at my own door, with my own figures, by a man whose job gave him no reason to do it honestly. That isn't a rogue salesman. That is the design. OK, so I WAS careless, but not how you thought.
Here is what never occurred to me at the door. They all discount. He presented his discounted rate against my old undiscounted rate, and "the best standard rate on the market right now" and called the difference a saving. I thought he was obliged to be more truthful than he actually is. His 20% off Bord Gáis beat what I was paying, and it beat Energia, but it didn't beat 37% off Energia. By my own reckoning, based on a year of real usage, I paid about €1,700 more than I needed to. I'm a heavy user, an electric car and a gas-heated house, so my gap is wider than most. The mechanism is the same for everyone though, it's only the scale that changes.
The electricity arriving at my house is the same electricity arriving at my neighbour's. Same Single Electricity Market, same wires. The gas comes down the same Gas Networks Ireland pipe. Suppliers can compete on service, on their app, on how they treat you when something goes wrong, and they should. But the thing itself is identical, so price is the one place where there is nothing to separate two offers except the number. And the number is the one thing the market has made impossible to read.
It does that by preying on the limitations of adult maths. Not money off a fixed price, but a percentage off a "standard" rate that almost nobody actually pays and that each supplier sets wherever it likes. On the same tariff, in the same month, one new customer of the same provider can be offered 10% off, the next 20%, the next 29%. Same product, same terms, different number, no reason anyone will put in writing. I'm not talking about night rates or electric-car rates, which track a real difference in cost and are fair enough. I'm talking about one electron, identical to the next, that costs more turning down the wire into my house than into my neighbour's. Same particle, same instant. Send it next door and, through the magic of discounting, it gets cheaper. Physics can't tell the two apart. The bill can.
Say that plainly and it stops sounding like a market. "Protecting competition" comes to mean protecting a company's freedom to charge more to whoever doesn't notice. That isn't a feature of the market. It's the harm, wearing the market's clothes. Why did your neighbour get 20% off and you got 10%? You said "Ah go on" a couple of times less than them. Same reason their neighbour got 29% and they got 20% I guess.
The official answer to all this is to tell you to shop around. Use an accredited comparison site. Switch every year. I'd put it another way. That advice is a "Caution! Hot Water!" sign on a handwash sink. A warning is the weakest thing you can do about a hazard. It's what you fall back on when you won't, or can't, simply bring the water to a non-scalding temperature. The sign does something quieter as well. It moves the blame. Once you've been told to compare, paying too much becomes your failure to shop, not the market's failure to be comparable. And even with €300 to €400 a year sitting on the table, the regulator's own figures show fewer than one in five households switch. The few who treat it like a part-time job stay ahead. The system runs on the many who can't keep up. That's a surcharge on distraction.
So I did the thing I was told to do, and then some. I wrote to the regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, because the market is theirs to oversee and this seemed like theirs to fix. A few months later I got a reply. It was considered, it was courteous, and it was a clear no. The reason given was that doing anything about this would amount to "direct price regulation," and that under the EU framework suppliers are free to set their own prices.
I've thought about that answer a lot, because at first it sounds like the end of the conversation.
Banning a practice is not setting a price. The Central Bank banned price-walking in insurance, the quiet trick of charging loyal customers more year on year, and it did so without ever telling anyone what to charge. A regulator can stop a behaviour without naming the number. It's a different corner of the law and I won't pretend it's a perfect twin, but the principle stands on its own feet.
Set the directive aside. A misleading sale is already against the law here, under the Consumer Protection Act, our version of the EU rules on unfair commercial practices, enforced by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. Freedom to set a price has nothing to say about a sale that misleads. The man at my door wasn't exercising pricing freedom. He was doing the thing the law already forbids, and the thing the regulator's own rulebook for suppliers forbids too, in plain words, about misleading people by what you leave out.
When offered a reading of the law that protects consumers and a reading that protects suppliers, the regulator reached for the one that protects suppliers, and handed the risk to the rest of us. That's a choice. It isn't a barrier they can't work around.
I'm not asking anyone to set prices. I'm asking for two ordinary things. Ban the practice of pricing an identical product by who's paying attention. And enforce the rules that already exist, at the door, where they're being broken. Until then, the advice to switch every year is the state quietly admitting the market doesn't work, and asking you to do its job for it.
I switched, for what it's worth. I shopped around, and I'm still not sure I got the best deal over all. Maybe the best deal on that day.