NPower News Update: Restructured Marketing Team

NPower Restructuring

NPower news update: NPower is restructuring its marketing team to incorporate the role of data and digital in hope to improve customer service and trust.

RWE NPower is one of the biggest energy suppliers in Europe. They are currently moving the 120 members of the marketing team to a location within the West Midlands. Here the team will grow to include more digital roles, insights and analytics. They also aim to broaden the skill set of the marketing team beyond traditional commercial marketing techniques by employing a new group of marketers. NPower is trying to rebuild their communication tactics to widen the roles of the public relation team and improve the communication with their bill payers through social networks. There are plans for more frequent and improved quality forums online throughout the year along with other planned events. These will be hosted to try and find potential gaps in the market for NPower to exploit and create new products and services. The company claims to be restructuring their business, at the heart of this process is digital. In the past they have be well known for their focus tactical campaigns, where special offers, low prices and high standards have been the main selling point. However they’re now aiming to produce easy to use content online and within their bills.

News for NPower Customer Services

NPower are set to release a new billing scheme which was announced earlier this month. The new scheme works for two different sets of people skimmers and checkers. It offers all the information the bill payer needs at the top for the skimmers and an in depth analysis further down the page for checkers. This new announcement of rearranging marketing to make life hassle free works well in promoting their new billing method. The new marketing will also show off the new tariff line up which has been reduced from seven to four. Both new initiatives that are being promoted are designed to reduce hassle and make NPower the number one customer service provider by 2015. The reduction in tariffs is mainly down to the new government program which prevents energy companies from offering more than four tariffs and requires for customers to be automatically moved to the cheapest, which can be altered at the customer’s discretion. The major six energy firms have already made the switch. For NPower it helps to improve customer satisfaction and moves them closer to achieving their goal of being number one of customer service within the coming year. To call the NPower customer service department, click on the link. For all other news updates and recent articles, visit the News Feed.

NPower News Update: Last Day of Power Station

NPower News Update: 13th August 2013 marks the last day of electricity generation at the Tilbury B Power station ending 46 years of successful operations.

The closure of the Tilbury B Station also marks the end of a combined total of 57 years of electricity generation on the Tilbury Site. The Tilbury B Power Station has played a vital role in the UK electricity production throughout the years since its opening in 1967. When opened the power station started as a 1,467MW coal-fired power plant. The station quickly established links with members of the community and throughout its life has contributed millions of pounds to the UK’s economy. From the power plants first day till now it has produced a huge total of 168.8TWh to power, homes, businesses, street lights and much more around the UK. The amount of power produced could keep just over 3 Billion light bulbs on for over a year. Tilbury B Power Station was forecast to close under the EU’s ‘Large Combustion Plant Detective’ (LCPD), giving the station only 20,000 hours of operation from 1 January 2008. In 2011 Tilbury commenced generation on 100% sustainable biomass, which as the time was a world first, for the remainder of the 20,000 hours allowed by the LCPD. This feat was even more impressive as the Station had spent the last 40 years running on coal alone. The permitted hours will run out on the 13th August 2013 at 12pm.

In 2010 the decision was made by the RWE to switch from coal to 100% biomass. The station after much consideration switched to wood biomass. Since this switch was made the Tilbury B Power Station has produced more than 10% of the UK’s total renewable energy making a significant contribution to providing low cost, low carbon energy. This was achieved by using the plants 750MW capacity for green energy. There was a second phase to this project; to provide the plant with another 10-12 years of life. To achieve this, the plant must be closed under the legislation of the LCPD and under go full redevelopment to convert the whole station to run on biomass to meet new and increasing high environmental standards. If everything went as planned for this second stage the plant would have been up and running again in roughly two years time. Unfortunately the Department for Energy and Climate Change has deemed this project ineligible and therefore the project cannot proceed. The Tilbury site itself remains an excellent power source for the UK and promises more to come in ways of power and biomass use in the near future.

For more information on NPower and regular updates please visit our website at http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/npower-phone-number/. News stories can also be found at http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/news

British Gas to Offer 'Free Electricity Saturdays'

In a radical move to reduce the strain on the national power grid through the week, British Gas have announced that they will be offering free electricity on Saturdays. Centrica, British Gas’ parent company, have already trialled this scheme in America could please everyone by cutting carbon emissions as well as benefitting the poorest families.

“He also said large businesses should be paid to ration their electricity usage on weekdays as a cheaper solution to a looming energy crunch than building new power plants that would only run ‘for a few hours a year’.

The 'free electricity Saturdays’ plan would require customers to have 'smart meters’, which send automatic usage readings back to the company. British Gas has installed 1m smart meters in UK homes and businesses to date.

Mr Laidlaw faced questions from analysts over whether the tariff would be seen as irresponsible by encouraging higher usage at a time when ministers are attempting to cut carbon emissions. ‘We will think very carefully about how we launch it [in the UK],’ he said.

However he insisted it would not necessarily lead to a rise in consumption, rather encouraging consumers to shift the timing of electricity-intensive activities. This could reduce the need to fire up extra power plants to meet demand on weekdays and reduce carbon emissions overall, he said.

Centrica's US business Direct Energy already offers the tariff to customers in the north-east US and is rolling out the tariff in Texas.

It hopes ‘ultimately’ to be able to offer it in the UK. ‘We are some distance away from getting all the systems in place,’ he told the Telegraph. ‘We want to see how well it works in Texas.’

The tariff could be launched mid-2014, Centrica said.

In the US customers enjoying ‘free’ electricity on Saturdays also face higher charges the rest of the time. However, Mr Laidlaw said consumers stood to benefit and it tended to be ‘low income high consuming families that take advantage of this, which is socially progressive not regressive’.

Mr Laidlaw was speaking as Centrica revealed a 9pc rise in half-year adjusted operating profits, to £1.58bn, as increased earnings from British Gas and gas storage and production offset falling profits from power plants.

[…]

Mr Laidlaw echoed recent warnings over possible power shortages as old plants close, saying there was a risk ‘if there are further plant closures without new investment’. However, he said ‘we should recognise that the risk is probably for a few hours a year’.

‘If there are ways in which we can work on demand response then... that can be a much more cost effective way of solving the security of supply situation than building a lot of plant that’s only going to run for a few hours a year,’ he said.

In June ministers courted controversy by backing a National Grid to pay large businesses to switch off between 4pm and 8pm on weeknights.

But Mr Laidlaw said the plan was sensible and the Hess energy supply business in America, which Centrica agreed to buy in a $1bn deal on Tuesday, already operated a similar scheme where customers who wish to ‘receive an additional incentive not to take power at certain times of the day’.

However, he criticised a parallel National Grid plan to pay companies to keep running power plants they would otherwise mothball. Mr Laidlaw said ministers should instead bring forward the introduction of a new system of capacity auctions that are not due to start making payments until 2018. ‘Having two forms of capacity mechanism, one for the short term and one for the long term, is a very complex way of doing it and may result in unintended consequences,’ he warned.

Mr Laidlaw said all Centrica’s potential UK power plant investments were on hold ‘waiting on subsidies’. A proposed £2bn offshore wind farm that it had hoped to take an investment decision this year was now caught up in a policy backlog awaiting confirmation of subsidies until the end of the year, and EU state aid clearance.

Mr Laidlaw said it would be ‘prudent’ for ministers to offer subsidies to encourage more gas storage, such as Centrica’s planned £1.4bn Baird project, as an ‘insurance policy’ to prevent the kinds of spikes seen in the March cold spell when storage levels fell ‘uncomfortably low’.

‘The risk is that if you have a situation where you are struggling for security of supply, you have to pay the highest price in the world to bring LNG to the UK. That could mean very significant additional costs on customer bills,’ he said.”

This article was originally sourced from The Telegraph.

If you are interested in any of the services British Gas offer, contact their customer services department using the number listed on the following link http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/british-gas-telephone-number/. You can find more information on customer services on our Ezine page.