UK energy supplier first utility has today announced a partnership with Google that will see the company integrate its smart meter service with the search giant’s recently launched online PowerMeter tool.

First:utility, which operates as an independent provider of gas and electricity to business and domestic customers, is currently in the process of rolling out free smart meters to all its customers and already operates a service where users can track their energy use online with energy use data updated every half hour.

However, company chief executive Mark Daeche told BusinessGreen.com that the new partnership with Google would make it easier still for users to monitor their energy use by providing data through their iGoogle desktop display.

“By integrating the data from our smart meters with the PowerMeter application we will be able to make sure the information is right there in your face each day,” he said, adding that surveys have shown that the more visible smart meter data is the more likely it is to help drive energy savings of up to 15 per cent.

Daeche said that due to privacy concerns customers would have to sign up to the new services to authorise first:utility to transfer their data to Google. But he predicted that the majority of the company’s smart meter customers would be interested in the new service. “It’s free of charge and we will email all customers in the middle of next month to notify them of new service,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you sign up?”

First:utility is the first UK firm to partner with Google’s PowerMeter project after a series of US utilities and smart meter firms signed up to integrate the technology into their own smart grid plans earlier this year.

Small business and households will be given more information and opportunity to switch power and gas suppliers, energy regulator Ofgem said on Monday. New regulations will include tougher rules on doorstep and telephone selling, and suppliers will have to provide clearer information on energy bills, in addition to an annual statement to help customers compare tariffs.

The threshold debt will also be doubled on pre-payment meters, to allow low-income consumer to switch suppliers at 200 pounds debt instead of 100 pounds.

Utilities’ treatment of customers will be judged on a new Ofgem standard of conduct, and the energy companies will have to publish revenue, cost, and profit from the production and supply of electricity and gas.

“As each measure comes into play, consumers including low-income households and small businesses will be armed with better information and protection,” Ofgem senior partner, Andrew Wright, said.

“That will give them more muscle in the market to put a greater competitive squeeze on the suppliers.”

Some measures, such as changes to rules for selling to customers face-to-face, will coming into force as early as Wednesday, while other changes coming into effect throughout 2010.

For small and medium sized companies, Ofgem intends to ban rolling energy contracts, meaning suppliers will have to inform businesses before renewing energy supply deals.

The new regulations are aimed at remedying flaws found it Ofgem’s recent Energy Supply Probe, which found that customers were missing out the cost benefits of changing utilities.

A great European war is about to begin. This is a war for natural gas, a struggle for control of the market in this vital fuel.

It is not, though, a fight over market share but something more fundamental: it is about control over the pricing mechanism, the way in which gas is bought and sold in Europe. It is an ideological conflict between promoters of free markets and others who support the stability of a managed price. It is also about the potential profits and losses at stake in £19 billion worth of unwanted gas.

The wholesale gas price has collapsed worldwide. It has been beaten down by recession and at the same time undermined by new discoveries in America and new supplies of sea-borne liquefied natural gas from the Gulf.

Households don’t see this in their bills but industrial buyers of gas have watched the spot or “day ahead” price fall from 70p per therm to about 20p over the past 12 months. One of the reasons your bill isn’t falling is that most of your gas was bought by a utility, not on the spot market but under a long-term contract with a big energy group.

It is these contracts, some as long as 30 years, that are now the subject of a tug-of-war between the world’s biggest companies. Europe’s gas buyers are not just demanding lower prices, they are looking to rewrite deals. They want to link long-term prices more closely to spot markets and they want the big gas suppliers in Siberia, the North Sea and North Africa to take more price risk.

The conflict erupted last week at the World Gas Conference when Alexey Miller, the chairman of Gazprom, flatly denied that his company would renegotiate prices or volumes. At the same time Wulf Bernotat, chief executive of E.ON, Gazprom’s biggest customer, said he was in talks over the deferral of unwanted volumes of gas.

In one corner, stubbornly, sit the suppliers — troubled giants such as Gazprom of Russia, Sonatrach of Algeria and StatoilHydro of Norway. These mainly sell gas through long-distance pipelines under “take-or-pay contracts”. These deals, sometimes linked to the entire output of a big gasfield, require purchasers to take specified annual volumes of gas. If they don’t take all the gas, they must pay for it anyway and the volume declined can be supplied later when demand for the fuel increases. The take-or-pay price is almost always linked to an index, made up typically of a basket of alternative fuels related to crude oil.

Take-or-pay was invented to provide stability in a simple world made up of single buyers and monopoly sellers — Russia selling gas to Germany or the old British Gas buying from Shell. Gas trading did not exist because there was no organised market. Shell needed the certainty of a guaranteed customer to justify the cost of drilling wells and building pipelines. British Gas wanted a reliable supplier and both sides wanted a certain price.

In the other corner, fuming, sit today’s buyers — companies such as Britain’s Centrica, E.ON of Germany, Italy’s ENI and GDF-Suez of France. They see the price of spot gas plummeting in liquid markets such as the NBP in Britain, at Zeebrugge in Belgium and America’s Henry Hub, but they have already bought gas from Russia at a gas price linked to oil, which remains stubbornly high.

Put in simple terms, today’s UK spot gas price of 26p per therm translates into an oil price of about $24 per barrel, compared with today’s crude price of about $75 per barrel.

According to Louise Boddy, of Icis Heren, the gas price consultants, the oversupply of take-or-pay gas is so large that utilities are dumping gas they cannot sell into the spot market and into storage. “Utilities are praying for a cold winter,” she said. “Otherwise they will have to sell gas at a loss or take contractual penalties.”

The problem will continue, says Simon Blakey, a gas expert at IHS-Cera, the energy consultants.

He reckons demand will remain below minimum contracted volumes into 2011. That means Europe could be working through its gas glut well into 2014-15.

Italy is squabbling with Russia over some $2 billion worth of contracted gas for which it has no customer, and if the glut, as expected, lasts three years, the whole of Europe is arguing about liability for a gas bubble worth $25-$35 billion at current prices. For Gazprom, it is a growing nightmare, compounded by the group’s enormous financial commitments to build pipelines in the Baltic and giant gasfields in the Yamal Peninsula and in the Barents Sea.

Money talks and Gazprom cannot ignore the convoys of ships from the Gulf, Egypt and Nigeria, dumping liquefied gas into tanks at Zeebrugge, the Isle of Grain and Milford Haven at prices that are half the cost of Russian take-or-pay gas.

For the Kremlin, it will be hard to accept that its biggest export earner, the nation’s No 1 taxpayer, should be subject to the daily whims of traders watching screens in London. Gazprom will put up a huge fight to prevent any linkage to spot markets and many outside Russia will wonder whether gas, the fuel that underpins Europe’s energy future, should become a trader’s plaything.

Many years ago in Britain, a great company almost collapsed when a new, liberalised market undermined the value of gas bought under old take-or-pay contracts. The company’s name was British Gas.

British gas prices rose early on Monday due to forecasts for colder weather next week, while power prices climbed on tighter supply margins due to outages. Gas for Tuesday was 24.50 pence per therm by 0915 GMT, up 1.50 pence from day ahead contracts late on Friday.

Working days next week showed the largest rise, of 3.20 pence to 26 pence. “People are looking at the forecast next week. It looks a little bit colder. Demand is expected to pick up next week,” said a trader.

Gas for November added 1.45 pence to 34.30 pence, while December rose 1.10 pence to 39.00 pence. The price rises came despite the system being long early on Monday, with ample supply from Norway via the Langeled pipeline and LNG terminals, including Isle of Grains and Milford Haven.

Flows through the BBL pipeline between Britain and the Netherlands fell to zero early on Monday. A spokesman for the pipeline company said there was no technical issue and the low flows were due only to an absence of interest from shippers. Port authority data showed on Monday that the Al Gharrafa liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker was scheduled to berth at Britain’s South Hook terminal on Oct. 16. 

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The Carbon Reduction Commitment will now be known as the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC). The new words have been added to better reflect the primary objective of the scheme which is the achievement of carbon emission reductions through increased energy efficiency.

The most important changes to the CRC policy as a result of the consultation include:

Cash flow – The first sale of allowances in April 2011 will now only require participants to purchase allowances for the year ahead and no longer for the previous year as well. This comes after stakeholder concern regarding the impact of a double sale on their cash flow. As a result, the first year of the Introductory Phase will therefore become a monitoring period.

Principal Subsidiaries - Large subsidiaries that would qualify in their own right can now choose whether to disaggregate themselves from their organisational group and participate independently. To reflect these changes, Principal Subsidiaries are now referred to as Significant Group Undertakings.

Early Action Metric - Organisations which have demonstrated commitment to reducing their emissions either by achieving the Carbon Trust Standard, or accreditation from an equivalent scheme can use this to be counted towards the Early Action metric. The relative weighting of this metric in the overall performance score, compared to the Absolute reduction and Growth metrics, will be reduced more gradually to better recognise early action taken, from 100% in the first year, 40% in the second year and 20% in the third year.

Treatment of renewables – The CRC will treat electricity which receives a Feed In Tariff in the same way as electricity which is issued a Renewable Obligation Certificate, and has simplified the approach to reporting and accounting for renewably generated electricity. As an energy efficiency mechanism, CRC will not provide additional incentives for renewable generation. We will, however, publish alongside the performance league table, the organisations increase in onsite renewable generation together with energy efficiency savings. This will allow organisations to gain reputational credit for their investment in onsite renewables.

Public Sector Organisations - The definition of a public sector organisation has been simplified to create better clarity for participants in the CRC. Organisations designated as a „public authority‟ in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Freedom of Information Act (Scotland) 2002 will participate in CRC on the basis of their individual FOI/FOI (S) listing, unless they are legally part of another body, in which case they would participate as part of that parent body.

CRC qualification pack mailing exercise

Qualification and registration guidance for potential CRC participants (“Qualification Pack”) will be published at the end of October. This set of guidance includes the following documents:

• Am I in?
• A guide for qualification and organisation structure
• Register as a CRC Participant; and
• Making an Information Disclosure

These guidance documents will be available on regulators‟ websites. For ease, the Environment Agency website is at: www.environment-agency.gov.uk/crc

The Environment Agency is the Administrator for the CRC throughout the UK, and will also be the scheme regulator in England and Wales. The Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency are the other regulators.

When the guidance is published, the Environment Agency will write to all potential participant organisation addresses with information on how to access the guidance. It will not mail the guidance itself to avoid organisations receiving parts of the guidance which may not be relevant to them, and to reduce paper waste.

The CRC regulators decided to release this guidance after the Government issued its response to the consultation so that organisations receive complete and accurate information that would not be subject to change. In the interim, to help organisations prepare for the CRC, a number of CRC Brief Guidance documents have been created. These include:

1. Early Action Metric
2. Automatic Meter Reading
3. Making an Information Disclosure

You can find these documents at www.environment-agency.gov.uk/crc. In May this year, a letter was sent to all Half Hourly Meter billing addresses introducing the CRC scheme and its obligations. The Environment Agency has now amended its database, and where possible, grouped together billing addresses that fall under the same company name. This should help to prevent organisations receiving duplicate letters.

British consumers could soon be lighting their homes and watching television powered by hydroelectricity generated in the fjords of Norway, under plans announced yesterday by National Grid.

The operator of the UK’s network of high-voltage wires said that it was in talks with Statnett, the Norwegian energy company, about laying a £1 billion cable beneath the North Sea to connect the countries. At more than 560 miles (900km), the high-voltage link from Kvilldal, Norway, to an unspecified point on English coast would be the longest of its kind in the world. It would have a capacity of about 1,000 megawatts, about the output of the Dungeness nuclear power station, according to a National Grid official. The companies have carried out a feasibility study and are selecting an optimal route.

As well as enabling Britain to import electricity from hydroelectric plants in Norway, the link would open the possibility of allowing the UK to export electricity generated from offshore wind farms in the North Sea to Norway. The Government hopes that the project will form the backbone of a “European supergrid”, linking different sources of renewable energy across the Continent.

Britain is committed to a vast expansion of onshore and offshore wind farms as part of its drive to generate about 30 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2020, up from 6 per cent. But if it succeeds, Britain will face big problems managing the inherent volatility of wind energy, when compared with the reliable output of conventional power stations.

Duncan Sinclair, director of Redpoint Energy, a consultancy that advises the Government, said: “More interconnectors like this are a good thing because, for a major electricity market, the UK is poorly linked in with other European countries. Being able to import electricity from Norway and other countries will play an important role in balancing the grid.”  The cable would be owned 50-50 by National Grid and Statnett.