Communication-Based Approach for Promoting Energy Consumer Switching: Some Evidence from Ofgem’s Database Trials in the United Kingdom

A Framework for the Analysis of the Sustainability of the Energy Retail Market

This paper addresses the issue of assessing the sustainability of policy decisions of the Energy Retail Market, explicitly considering the retail energy market, unlike existing approaches in the literature that analyze the energy market as a whole. The sustainability assessment is treated as the process by which the sustainability implications of an initiative are assessed, where the initiative can be a proposed or existing policy, plan, program, project, piece of legislation, or current practice or activity. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the literature on the sustainability of policy decisions in the retail energy sector and formulates a conceptual framework for policy sustainability analysis in the retail energy sector. The systematic review is complemented by a quantitative bibliometric analysis on the 48 collected papers published from 1997 to 2022. The proposed framework allows for a balanced analysis of the sustainability of policy decisions by evaluating the technical, economic, and environmental impacts. It could be used to develop a list of indicators that can map the different impacts and their interactions. Critical analysis of the existing findings leads us to identify future research directions.

Changing Energy Supplier on the Market with a Strong Position of Incumbent Suppliers—Polish Example

The purpose of the study is to identify factors affecting the intention to change an energy supplier. This is in a country, Poland, where competition in the energy market has been intensifying over several years, but incumbent suppliers still have an extremely strong position on the market, and the tendency to change an energy supplier is relatively low. The survey was conducted in 2020 on a sample of 1216 adults. The research results were used for a multigroup SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) analysis using AMOS 26. The main findings indicated a strong impact on a general image of a company, as well as the lack of importance of a green image of the current energy supplier. In the general research approach, there are no visible differences in the impact of the perceived price transparency on the intention to switch the supplier. However, taking into consideration two groups (a low energy bill vs. a high energy bill), some interesting differences are visible. In the markets with low consumers’ intention to switch, the strong position of incumbent suppliers is due to their exceptionally strong image in these markets. Spending time on maintenance is the biggest disadvantage for new energy suppliers who, when entering the market, have to look for differentiators.