Draft Determination for the Power NI Supply Price Control 2025-2029

The Utility Regulator has published its draft determination for Power NI’s next supply price control for 2025-2029. The draft determination outlines our minded-to decisions on the scope, duration, operating costs allowance and profit margin for the Power NI supply price control, which is due to commence in April 2025.

Power NI was the first domestic electricity supplier in Northern Ireland and remains the dominant supplier in the market. We therefore regulate the charges that they pass on to their customers, which we do through the price control process and the tariff setting process. 

A price control sets out funding decisions on a range of areas, including how much the company can charge consumers to run its business, how the company is going to operate and their level of profit margin. In determining the price control, we scrutinise and challenge Power NI’s Business Plan and review their cost forecasts. We then set out the charges that Power NI can recover, ensuring their customers receive a quality service at a reasonable cost. 

The overall purpose of the price control is to set an efficient level of revenue for Power NI, which the company then collects through its regulated electricity tariffs.

Over the four-year period, we have proposed that Power NI receives an allowance of £152 million in operating costs. We are also proposing a margin which is equivalent to 2.2% of revenue. The allowances provided for within this next price control for Power NI make up around 8% of a typical domestic customer’s bill (as of the 1 December 2024 tariff rate).

Our draft decisions are being published for consultation and we would encourage you to make your views known to us. It is important that we are provided with a range of responses that will help us deliver the most robust and informed decisions as we finalise this next price control for Power NI.

The publication of the draft determination follows on from our ‘Approach’ consultation, published in November 2023, and the Final Approach document in March 2024. 

For next steps, we plan to publish our Final Determination on the price control and a consultation on the licence modifications in April 2025. The consultation period will last for four weeks and details of how to respond will be provided at the time of publication. 

Further information:

• Your response may be made public by the Utility Regulator. If you do not want all or part of your response or name made public, please state this clearly in the response by marking your response as ‘CONFIDENTIAL’.

• If you want other information that you provide to be treated as confidential, please be aware that, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, there is a statutory Code of Practice with which public authorities must comply and which deals, amongst other things, with obligations of confidence. In view of this, it would be helpful if you could explain to us why you regard the information you have provided as confidential.

• Information provided in response to this consultation, including personal information, may be subject to publication or disclosure in accordance with the access to information regimes (these are primarily the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 2018.

• As stated in the GDPR  Privacy Statement for consumers and stakeholders, any personal data contained within your response will be deleted once the matter being consulted on has been concluded though the substance of the response may be retained. 

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