Following a recent review, the Utility Regulator has approved and agreed with NIE that the current interim market system and supporting arrangements for domestic electricity switching are capable of dealing with an increased number of switches (churn capacity) per month from the current limit of 7,500 to 10,000 (from 1st December 2011). The previous capacity had assumed that no more than 10% of customers switching would be keypad customers, however this too has been revised following an increase in resources and NIE call centre opening times. Depending on market activity the current limit of 10,000 will be split c.50:50 between keypad and credit customers. The overall switching limit ceiling capacity of 125,000 was also reviewed and it was agreed to increase this ceiling to 140,000 following improvements made to the system. This ceiling capacity is related to the system capacity currently in place for month-end bill processing and the increase in the ceiling is based on assumptions about (i) the introduction of continuous DUoS billing (by end February), (ii) the Enduring Solution Project go live date (May 2012) and (iii) suppliers working within their allocated capacity to ensure their allocations are not breached.
The recent review follows an Interim Market Arrangements paper (prepared in August 2009) in which we noted that when a new supplier entered the market, the switching limits would be kept under review to assess if there were any opportunities to increase the switching capacity.
The Utility Regulator and NIE will continue to review both the overall & monthly switching limits and also the allocation between keypad and credit switches (including apportionment of the available capacity among suppliers). The long-term solution (also known as the Enduring Solution), which is due to go-live in May 2012, will replace the current interim system and will deliver unconstrained domestic customer switching.