Older gas installations have historically benefited from lower charges through shared charges by being ‘aggregated’ to other supplies on site giving them one Meter Point Reference Number and combined transportation and metering costs. Since April 2014 suppliers have not been allowed to aggregate meters together into one supply point and from July 2015, all existing aggregated meters must be de-aggregated by the supplier. This will result in the supplies being assigned individual transportation and metering cost and will mean an increase in standing charges on gas supplies that currently share these costs.
The reasons for the change are:
- Aggregating several meter points into single supply points does not result in cost reflective capacity rates being passed on to the bill payer.
- The aggregation rules for suppliers are cumbersome to administer and are not easy to apply.
- The removal of multi meter supply points will improve the granularity of consumptions when booked as part of a Directly Metered Supply Point component.