Blog: Non-traditional business models – Bristol Energy

Challenging, dynamic, great fun, hard work… just some of the words I would use to describe working at Bristol Energy.

We’re owned by Bristol City Council, which makes us one of the first municipal energy companies in the UK. But we’re also run as a standalone business, by a fantastic team of experts from across the sector and beyond – all passionate about working for an energy company that is far from traditional.

It’s been an incredibly exciting few months. With solid support from Bristol City Council, we’ve developed a great range of competitive and fair tariffs – ensuring we are true to an ethos we share with the City Council: providing fair and ethical energy for all.

You can’t pretend to be different and then do the same as everyone else. We want to reach out to as many customers as possible and so, very early in our life, we opened the Bristol Energy Hub – right in the heart of Bristol. It’s the base for our customer care team and an event space where we can host events for our community. Oh, and you can walk in and sign-up, or give us a meter reading, or pay your bill…. and we even make a decent cup of tea! It’s proved really popular with our customers, some of whom have never switched before.

We’re also a national energy business and are delighted to welcome customers from across the UK. The key premise, that our profits are returned to our community, is proving to be very powerful with our customers – wherever they live.

But we will never be just about the mainstream. Being a force for social good is what drives us forward. We have already launched our prepayment meter tariff, and have embarked on a smart meter trial to help people take better control of their energy use.

We are working hard to address the issues of fuel poverty, which affects so many households, and have set up local partnerships with community groups and charities to reach out to the most vulnerable.

We always knew how important the issue of climate change would be to our customers and have just secured our first renewables contracts. We will be offering our first green tariff very soon. And we’re not just for domestic customers either; we have just entered the business market, too.

So, not a bad start for a fledgling energy company, that really cares about the social impact of energy retailing. Oh, and we have already saved our customers over £2,000,000.