Community switch

Question

Community switch

Energy4 · Accepted Answer

Council community switch is when a business or broker offers special prices to domestic customers by bringing many domestic customers together, with this large demand they can apply leverage to the network to provide much more competitive prices.

This Council Community switch is also refrred to as the Big Switch, Area Community Switch, Switch Together, Large Switch.

Energy4 has monitored domestic community switch for a while. After collecting information on the price of standing charge, and unit charge offered it has been found that there is no difference between the price offered by a domestic community switch and the price supplied by the noted supplier on there website. Energy4 did not identify a benefit.

Domestic customers should remain vigilant, and check the supply price being offered by the switch against what the supplier can provide. Switch should provide better prices, but Energy4 has yet to find any witch group who can provide evidence that this has actually happened.

Commercial collective switching does provide benefits, and placing sites and factories together has provided better prices for many Energy4 customers.

Benefits for communities and schools
Additional benefits are available for community organisations and education providers on the FIT scheme. These are for generators who have applied through pre-registration and status verification.

These benefits include:

A relaxation of the minimum energy efficiency requirement to level G and above (instead of level D and above), for non-domestic solar PV community energy and school installations to receive the higher generation tariff rate. This applies to installations with capacities up to 250kW Declared Net Capacity (DNC).
An additional six months to the ROO-FIT preliminary accreditation validity period for solar PV and non-PV installations owned by community organisations, for applications made between 1 April and 1 October 2015 and from 8 February 2016.
Two installations can share a single grid connection providing that at least one is owned by a community organisation. This is only applicable from 1 April 2015.
For applications made before 1 October 2015, a ‘tariff guarantee’ was also available for community organisations planning to commission non-domestic solar PV installations that will not exceed 50kW DNC.