We know that many customers like to keep their paper communications to an absolute minimum, and are keen to know when Good Energy will be able to implement paperless billing – i.e. a system which will enable you to view your account and pay your bills online. We’ve been working on this for some time, and have made progress in some areas already – for example you can now submit Meter Reads online and we accept credit card payments over the phone. However, a full paperless billing system will take a little longer to bring in. Our CEO, Juliet Davenport, explains why:

“Work on our systems gets prioritised in order of ‘high risk’ e.g. something is broken and needs to be fixed; ‘medium risk’ e.g. some regulatory issue has come up; and ‘new stuff’, which includes things like paperless billing.  During the last year we managed to keep our ‘high risk’ stuff down – but the ‘medium risk’ stuff has kept the team flat out, developing new systems for Feed-in Tariffs and making sure that we implement all the new licence changes which affect our bills, such as info about historical usage.  There is no slack in our systems team - the largest team in the company in 2010.

“Our vision is to offer a choice to Good Energy’s customers in how they receive information and manage their accounts.  We want to introduce an online account facility that will allow you to manage your own preferences; including receiving bills by email, rather than post.  Our plans include the possibility of being able to view past bills online including your payments, any credits, as well as your meter readings, graphs showing historical usage and so much more that will help you understand your usage and bills. We are working on engaging ways to help customers reduce their energy consumption through this.

“One of the issues for the company now is meeting our requirements under the Smart Metering provisions. This may eventually lead to customers being able to receive statements directly to their meters, and any system that we develop for paperless billing needs to be compatible with the Smart Metering protocols developed by government. Developing a system that doesn’t could mean we’d need to throw it away and start again.

“In addition to this we want to consider how we deliver paperless billing in the lowest carbon way, as paperless doesn’t necessarily mean carbon-free.  The growth in energy use of online servers currently outstrips that of aviation, so making sure that our system doesn’t clog up the servers of the world is important to us.

“We are currently pushing government very hard to determine how the DataCommsCo (the central communications facility for Smart Metering) will work, and to finalise the technical specifications for Smart Meters so that we can begin to push forward with our own solution. (Further information on smart metering can be found here.)

Until we can introduce paperless billing, we will continue to try and keep our paper communications to a minimum – and to use chlorine-free, 100% recycled paper, vegetable-based inks, and a print supplier who meets the highest environmental standards, as we always have done.