The finance minister said he expected household energy costs to fall in the coming weeks as he confirmed energy credits would be reintroduced this winter, reports Breaking News.
As reported by the Irish Examiner, Michael McGrath said the government had built a “good model” around the introduction of energy credits last year.
They cost the family around €600 as part of a wider package to mitigate the impact of the energy crisis on society after the war in Ukraine, reports Breaking News.
However, seven weeks before the 2024 budget was announced, energy companies were criticized for not passing on to customers the wholesale electricity prices they had seen since the start of the year.
By May, wholesale electricity prices had fallen 26 percent between May 2022 and May 2023, but prices for domestic customers had not kept pace with the decline.
“While I do expect retail energy costs will begin to fall and we need them to fall quickly, we need the pass-through [to consumers] to happen because we’ve seen dramatic reductions at the wholesale level. We need that to happen at retail level and I think in the coming weeks we will see some of the main retail energy providers reduce their rates. But the rates aren’t going to come back down to the levels that we had for consumers before the war in Ukraine for a while yet. So I think it is undoubtedly the case that many households will require additional help and the budget is the time where we set out how we’re going to do that,” Mr McGrath said, reports Breaking News.
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