Ofgem should replace the current “vanilla” supplier model with an insurance-backed assurance model, innovator Laura Sandys has insisted.
Writing in a column for Utility Week, she said this would encourage more “retailer behaviour” and “drive up standards”.
Sandys, who is chief executive of not-for-profit organisation Challenging Ideas, wrote: “The challenge for the energy sector is not if change is happening, but at what speed and at what cost.
“We need to move beyond incremental changes within silos in the sector to a managed revolution across the sector to capture the exciting decarbonisation dividend.”
Challenging Ideas will publish a new report – ReDesigning Regulation – on Tuesday 11 December.
This report recommends a reshaping of the market, to “re-engineer it from the plug rather than the power station, starting with demand rather than supply”.
In the column, Sandys wrote: “With new and different value available in the future electricity system, we need to redesign the market and replace the vanilla commodity of a unit with a multi-dimensional set of values around time, location and service to the system and equality between demand and supply.”