The birth of Ebico
Phil Levermore, managing director, describes his part in the story of how Ebico was first launched.
“While working for British Energy in the late 1990s, I was tasked with working up a business case for the company to enter the newly liberalising domestic gas and electricity market. As I prepared the plan it became clear that, to make most money, the type of customer that the company should ‘target’ was wealthy, preferably using a lot of electricity and gas in their home, and paying by direct debit.
“It didn’t take a genius to realise that all the other potential suppliers of domestic energy would be coming to the same conclusion! This would mean that there would be lots of competition for that type of customer, hence they would be offered the best deals – whereas there would be no competition for folk who had to budget for their fuel very carefully with pre-payment meters. So this second group would always get the worst deal – even though they were likely to be the very folk who needed lower energy prices the most. And this turned out to be the case.
“I thought this was very unfair and decided to do something about it. Along with other Christian energy professionals, I set up Ebico with the aim of getting fair prices to all customers while offering the lowest prices to customers who were unable to use direct debit facilities.
“Having established our fair trade energy tariff concept, we wanted to make sure we could back it with outstanding customer service and billing. So we set up a deal with Scottish and Southern Energy that enabled us to support EquiGas (and later EquiPower) with the award-winning services of this major British energy company. The combination has been powerful – while other new energy companies have come and gone, Ebico has been delivering the fairest prices to British household energy customers for nearly ten years.
“For those who want to make their energy consumption more sustainable, we introduced our EquiClimate CO2 offsetting service in 2005. This uses the Europe-wide market in carbon dioxide to offset the CO2 produced from the use of domestic energy and transportation.’