This week, Rebel Energy posted a notice on its website announcing that it had ceased trading. According to the Telegraph, around 90,000 customers of the energy retailer will be moved by the regulator, Ofgem, to another supplier. Central to the newspaper’s story is Rebel’s failure to maintain a ‘ring-fenced’ account, from which payments under the Renewable Energy Obligation green energy subsidy mechanism are supposed to be made. This is a surprise, because one of Rebel’s main marketing gimmicks was its commitment to green energy, another being social justice. “We’re fighting for fairness in energy,” exclaims the company website’s “mission” page, which claims to battle “the injustices that burden our customers and the planet”. Maybe if its directors weren’t larping as white knight, planet-saving superheroes, the energy company might still be a going concern.
Rebel joins 31 energy retailers that have gone bust since 2020 – almost all of them in 2021. Many of them were, by the standards of competitors, tiny boutiques with 10,000 or fewer customers. The largest was Bulb Energy, with 1.7 million customers. The late 2010s were also bad years for the energy upstarts. Twenty-nine firms went bust between 2015 and 2021. The most notable of these were Bristol Energy and Robin Hood Energy, with 155,000 and 112,000 domestic customers respectively.
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