Conor Pope

And it seems almost inevitable because the way the domestic energy companies work is they hedge their oil and gas and their energy needs.

But that period is going to come to an end fairly soon.

Then they will be entering the market when energy prices are much more volatile, crude oil prices are much higher, gas prices are much higher.

And even wind prices will be much higher because they are all linked when it comes to the pricing structure for consumers.

And as a result, we're all going to end up paying more.

And there's very little we can do about that.

Well, 100%.

And sorry, when I say there's very little we can do, I mean, by that I mean there's very little we can do about the macro picture, about what's happening on a global level.

But there are huge steps that we can take that will save us money as individual householders.

Okay, step number one.

The first thing is, and we've talked about it endlessly, is the switching scenario.

Now, the reality is, and we kind of have a playbook for this already, because we saw what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine and energy prices spiked.

And the first thing that happened was the energy companies cut all the discounts that they were making available to new customers.

So there would have been discounts pre-war in the East of up to 30, even 35% on domestic energy.

And then as the war in Ukraine deepened and as the energy crisis worsened, the level of discounts fell from 25%, 30% down to 5%, 3%.

Right now, there are still really good discounts available if you move from company A to company B. You can save yourself around 10%, 15%, 20% off the cost of your domestic energy bill over the course of a year.

And if you can save yourself 20% and you're spending three grand on your energy, that's a saving right there of 600 quid.

There's two different price comparison websites that I'd recommend.

And they're switcher.ie and bonkers.ie.

And the reason why I recommend them is because they take all of the pain out of the switching process.