Given the email I received this morning telling me my DD was increasing by 50%, I’m guessing Bulb will be just fine. Especially as they are still holding a £100 balance, and the weather is still mild. I feel like I’m supporting them single handed. 
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Yep - got that too. I’ve worked out that the difference in tariff is 30% increase on both electricity and gas. 
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If you want to support them you should post over here:
https://community.bulb.co.uk/t/who-here-would-be-willing-to-help-bulb-survive-if-it-came-to-it/101854
Also - with a credit balance of £100 I’m afraid to tell you you are totally small fry for bulb:
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I was with Avro, now Octopus.
Just over 50% increase in my DD.
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Ouch…… 
Wonder how you get to a credit balance of £1000 ?
Have you looked at the actual unit rates and estimated your usage over the next 12 months to see if the DD they’ve set is accurate? You can easily set your own DD with Octopus.
That is based on the annual consumption figures on my last Avro bill, using the rates from the Flexible Avro tariff, and divided by 12.
£79pm is the forecast DD
Avro was £52pm. I was £30 in cr when crashed.
Still waiting to hear from Octopus officially. They may try and set higher!
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Well, when you consider that folks who aren’t on Smart meters, many never bother to submit actual meter readings because quite simply, many people are too damn lazy. So they’ll always pay the estimated bill which clearly may well be much higher than their actual usage and bingo! before you know it, folks are hundreds of ££££ in credit. If someone is £1000 in credit, the easiest thing to do is just to cancel your direct debit until the balance is almost gone through subsequent bills. If the energy provider complains, tell them to urinate off.
I’ve never been in a huge amount of credit with any supplier because, you’ve guessed it, I’ve always supplied actual meter readings. A couple of suppliers have attempted to increase my D/D far above my actual usage for reasons known only unto them. This has usually resulted in quite the argument online or over the phone, but I’ve always gotten my own way.
Very happy to be paying monthly by variable direct debit because obviously, I’m only ever paying for what I use. Thankfully too, at this incredibly difficult time, I’m on a ridiculously cheap tariff (compared to the horrendous tariffs currently on offer!) with British Gas having fixed just prior to everything going Pete Tong.
So the boss of Scottish Power wants to see the price cap abolished:
Abolish energy price cap, says Scottish Power boss - BBC News
It’s a bit of a conundrum isn’t it? Scrap the price cap in order to ‘save’ smaller energy firms from going bust by effectively allowing the industry to raise energy prices to a point that would quite possibly, see ordinary households being asked or required to pay direct debits of at least £160 a month or more to cover the cost of their energy use. There are going to be some very unhappy households this winter, especially those that live in colder parts of the country.
So we could be left with just the Big 5 or 6 in the coming weeks once all of the tiny companies have gone down the pan. People may complain about there being little choice left, but look at the water supply industry, no household has a choice about which water company they can be a customer of because it’s regionalised and therefore there’s no competition allowing different regional water companies to charge different rates depending entirely on where one lives. But then I guess energy supply is a little similar in that respect because energy companies can and do charge different tariffs depending on where you live in the U.K.
Not really? Companies are being demanded currently to sell at a loss
This kind of regulatory price cap should have always had an understanding that if prices raised so quickly the cap required firms to go bust, that a new cap at break-even prices would be shifted to immediately
Companies should have budgeted more for a scenario like this. It’s not like they didn’t have the income to do so
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I’m sure energy prices have been in this region before - the unexpected bit is the speed of the increase.
No one could predict a scenario like this to budget for it?
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To be fair, I’ve never had a direct debit of more than £68 a month combined gas and electric. For me to be paying £160 for example, would be a pretty huge deal. Currently my gas and electric comes to around £56 a month combined, although currently we have no heating on and there is only me and the Wife and we’re not in any way power hungry individuals.
I agree, the speed of the increase is what will hit people hard. I’m sure as is usual though, people are busy already getting themselves into debt buying crap in for Christmas just to add to their woes.
… this exact scenario has been predicted in various forms for years. The spot market, low-hedge model has always been considered high risk, for - what I think are - pretty obvious reasons, given the history of fossil fuel markets. You don’t need to budget for it, you need to create a system that can withstand it
You can’t budget for it, because the price rise is massive and sudden.
You can’t create a system to withstand it unless we decide to start recolonisation of countries with more natural resources
It isn’t looking great for Bulb:
It’s a too big to fail argument all over again. The government will to prop them up somehow and, looking back to 2008, it will probably make money off doing so, eventually
I agree, there would be little option but to temporarily nationalise Bulb if it fails because quite simply, OFGEM probably wouldn’t be able to migrate that many customers to other companies. They certainly wouldn’t migrate any customers onto much smaller energy firms anyway because I suspect, the risk of subsequent failure of those smaller players. Let’s see how this week plays out.