MARKS & Spencer, purveyor of food, wine and clothes to the British middle classes, is moving into energy provision.
And it will not be selling any old power. M&S's electricity will not come from coal, nuclear or gas. It will be strictly "green", generated by the hydro electricity stations in the Highlands owned by Perth-based Scottish & Southern Energy.
Un
der the deal announced today, from later this month M&S will use shopping vouchers to lure customers to sign up to its new electricity – and gas – products.
SSE, Britain's largest renewable energy supplier, has agreed that all the electricity going to M&S customers will come from its Scottish hydro generating plants – as it does for under its own "better" plan.
As well as appealing to customers' concerns over the environment, M&S will also give them more straightforward financial rewards.
Customers who reduce their annual energy usage by 10 per cent in the first year will receive a £15 M&S voucher and those opting for paperless billing will receive an additional £10 voucher.
New dual-fuel customers – those who sign up to M&S Energy for both electricity and gas accounts – will be given £20 in vouchers for signing up and a further £10 every year they remain a customer.
Customers will also be given advice on how to cut their energy use.
Customers will pay on average £1,196 a year for the standard dual-fuel tariff bill (including VAT) – the same as it costs at SSE.
A spokeswoman for M&S said customers would be offered a single, simple product, in an industry the company itself finds complex.
"We're a big procurer of energy ourselves and we spend a lot of time looking at the market and we find the sector quite complex and confusing, so we want to make it easier for customers."
The services will be available online and in 16 stores from 27 October; by the end of the year M&S expects to be selling the services in 62 stores.
M&S declined to comment on how many customers it was aiming to sign up, but it sold financial service products to 4.5 million customers through M&S Money, which offers services ranging from credit cards to foreign currency.
Perth-based SSE, now Scotland's second largest company by market value, has taken on hundreds of thousands of new customers over the past few years, giving it 8.5 million gas and electricity customers.
"For us its a new and hopefully successful route to market," a spokesman for SSE said. "If you want to continue to grow you've got to be able to find new ways to reach customers."
The full article contains 454 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
