Much fuss all round last month as the local BBC finally cottoned on to what we’ve been saying for over a year now and announced that the council’s vanity energy reselling firm, Bristol Energy, has now LOST £24MILLION with no end to the losses in sight!
The BBC even pointed out that the council’s so-called “INVESTMENT” in Bristol Energy jumped by 40 per cent in six months last year from £17million to £24million. But is it even an investment if you’re unlikely to get your money back?
Bristol City Council and Bristol Energy’s response to their loss-making disaster continues to be shrouded in “COMMERCIALLY CONFIDENTIAL” mystery. Although an UNKNOWN Bristol Energy spokesman assured the BBC that the money would be paid back “with interest”! How, we’re not told.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the city council director who set up the company, Bill “Dick” Edrich, has been quietly OUSTED as a director of Bristol Energy and replaced with the Reverend’s new golden boy, Colin “HEAD BOY” Molton of the Colin Molton Consultancy Ltd.
Head Boy, currently the very well remunerated interim Executive Director of Growth and Regeneration at the council, is the latest CHANCER to have the ear of the Reverend. He comes from a senior post at the Homes and Community Agency (HCA) and it appears he is being paid a SMALL FORTUNE in the region of £5k a week by the Reverend to get some housing developments moving in Bristol prior to the next mayoral election.
But what exactly does he know about the energy reselling business?
But what exactly does he know about the energy reselling business?
TBF there’s not a lot to know, you need enough customers to be able to buy cheap enough energy from one of the big generators to be able to sell it for either roughly the same (& differenciate yourself enough by service or tech) or simply sell it slightly cheaper. The other option would be to invest many £bns and generate it yourself and sell that.
My initial thought was they were going to quietly sell off the customer base and dissolve the business. However as the pace of losses seems to be increasing and they aren’t investing in technology or infrastructure my guess is they are buying customers to get to that break-even point, making the business quite an attractive proposition if you aren’t saddled with the £30m start up cost.
It would be ideal for a Company like *Wessex Water to take them over (obviously minus the debt), Wessex already have all the admin, back office, technology and sales force to simply absorb BE whilst making significant operational savings on the BE side of the business. Or even spin it off as a Private Company, obviously minus the debt.
*Wessex just used as an example