What you pay for?

A lot happens behind the scenes to get energy into your home. The diagrams below show how your energy bill is made up.

About half of your bill pays for the energy itself. The rest covers costs such as delivering energy to your home, meeting the cost of government schemes and keeping your account running smoothly.

Operating profit/loss(1) - This is the profit, or loss, we made from supplying energy to our residential customers. In 2015 EDF Energy made a small profit of less than 1% from its supply of gas to residential customers.  However, the total cost of supplying electricity exceeded the prices charged to customers, creating a 1% operating loss from the supply of electricity.

Wholesale energy costs(2) - This is what we pay to gas producers and electricity generators to buy energy for our customers. Prices can be volatile depending on the price of global commodities such as coal and gas. We try to protect our customers against any sudden wholesale price movement by buying energy in advance, thereby smoothing out our costs over time.

Network costs - Once we buy this energy, we need to get it to your home. For every unit of energy you use, we pay fees (most of which are regulated by OFGEM) to the owners of the pipes and wires.

Environmental and social obligations - We take part in government schemes to improve energy efficiency, fund renewable energy and help vulnerable customers.

Operating costs(3) - This covers the cost of keeping your account running smoothly. Things like UK call centres, sending you bills and reading your meter. We are continually exploring new ways to keep these costs as low as possible.

VAT - This is set by the government at 5% on all domestic energy bills.

For more information our 2015 Ofgem segmented accounts can be found here.

This breakdown of our costs to supply energy is based on our residential supply business for 2015 as per our Ofgem segmented statements.  It is an average of all payment types, based on the average usage of EDF Energy customers.