Companies: SSE   

Scottish & Southern Energy, the UK’s second-largest energy supplier, has pledged to keep its prices unchanged until at least 30 March 2008.

In a statement to the stock exchange, SSE, insisting it is currently the country’s cheapest energy supplier, stated its commitment to keep electricity and gas prices for domestic customers at current levels ‘for the rest of this winter and until at least the start of the British summer’. Significantly, household energy consumption is at its highest during the year’s first quarter, when the average UK household uses roughly 40 per cent of its annual gas consumption and 30 per cent of its electricity consumption.

The £12.97 billion FTSE 100 giant’s ‘fair pricing’ policy is that it seeks to be the last, ‘or one of the last’, of the energy suppliers to increase prices, ‘if it has to and the first, or one of the first, to lower prices if it can’. The SSE announcement came as British Gas, the UK’s largest supplier, announced a 15 per cent rise in gas and electricity prices, a move that followed price hikes from both RWE npower and EDF Energy.

As well as astute gas and electricity purchasing and growing efficiency within the business, SSE has been the biggest beneficiary among the ‘big six’ suppliers of windfall gains created by the free allocation of carbon dioxide permits under the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The company has added more than 700,000 customer accounts over the past year. This takes its total customer base to 8.2 million.

Scottish & Southern Energy	LSE	£9301.3m	1062.00p	-41.00p
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SSE commits to keep prices on hold			08/02/2008