URE Energy in danger of having licence revoked

URE Energy is in danger of having its licence revoked within the next three months if the supplier fails to comply with a final order issued by Ofgem.

The energy regulator has issued URE with written notice of its failure to comply with the final order in which it must pay Ofgem the £209,013.78 it owed in outstanding Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs).

The notice was issued on 1 May and further explains that if URE does not rectify its failure to comply with the order to the “satisfaction of the authority”, the regulator may “at any time” revoke the supplier’s electricity supply licence.

Big six supplier SSE made representations in support of the proposal to issue the final order, with the large supplier sharing the regulator’s concern that compliant suppliers are penalised by shortfalls arising from non-compliant suppliers, such as URE.

Writing in a recent post on LinkedIn, Ian Barker, managing partner at BFY Consulting, said it was “highly likely” that URE ceased trading in December last year.

Barker also referenced the fact that the URE website appeared to be offline (below image) for a period last month. It is since now up and running.

He added: “As we advised a number of creditors in December 2018, it was highly likely that URE stopped trading in late 2018 and had sold their customer base.”

URE was given an extended deadline of 31 March to pay its outstanding ROCs payments along with Greater Manchester-based supplier Eversmart Energy.

URE failed to make the required payment by the deadline and has not made any relevant payment subsequently, according to Ofgem.

Eversmart Energy however has since announced it has now paid all of its remaining payments.

In November last year URE was revealed to be in credit default with Elexon and in section H default under the balancing and settlement code.

Utility Week has repeatedly contacted URE Energy for comment but is yet to receive a response.

An “unprecedented” 34 suppliers failed to meet their full Renewables Obligation (RO) by the 1 September deadline last year, which resulted in a combined shortfall of £102.9 million in the England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland buy-out funds (up from £18.7 million in 2017). This works out as an average of £3.02 million per supplier.

In November, the regulator announced a mutualisation process would be triggered for the first time ever after the outstanding payments following the final deadline exceeded a threshold known as the relevant shortfall.

The level of the shortfall was confirmed at £58.6 million.

A number of suppliers named as owing RO payments beyond the 31 October late payment deadline have ceased trading.

These include: Iresa, Spark, Extra, Future Energy, Gen4U, Snowdrop, Economy Energy and Brilliant Energy.