Policy & Grants  ·  Issue 10  ·  Tuesday 29 September 2026

Watts Happening

The UK energy newsletter that doesn't work for the industry

The Spark

Ofgem splits unpaid energy bills two ways. Households that have agreed a plan with their supplier to pay off what they owe. And households more than three months behind with no plan at all.

The first group owes £842 on electricity, on average. The second owes £1,872, and it is the bigger group: 1.19 million accounts against 889,000.

Friday's TUC release gave £842 as the average and set it beside the 1.2 million with no plan. Their real average is more than twice that.

Households now owe £5.02bn, up 13% in a year.

This Week in Watts

GB Energy hired the founder of Ripple. A court is still deciding whose money Ripple held.

This month Great British Energy announced a new Managing Director of Local Energy. Sarah Merrick will lead the team delivering its Local Power Plan, up to £1bn aimed at giving every community in the UK the chance to be involved in a local energy project. GB Energy's announcement runs through her career and ends with "founding Ripple, a community energy startup." Comments on that post are now switched off. GB Energy did not respond by our deadline.

Ripple is in administration. It collapsed in March 2025, and Merrick is still listed as a director, as is usual in administration. The administrators record that the directors found "a significant level of accounting discrepancies" in late 2024.

The model was simple. Members bought shares in a co-op that owned a wind or solar farm, and took their return as savings on their electricity bills. Ripple's first three projects were built and generate power today.

The fourth was Whitelaw Brae, a wind farm in the Scottish Borders. In spring 2024 Ripple asked the public for up to £56m to buy and build it. Page 8 of the share offer promised that if not enough was raised to build it, "we will return all funds including arrangement fees to applicants." In December 2024 the site went to another company, Thrive Renewables. In January 2025 Ripple told members it hoped to restart selling shares. Two months later it collapsed.

Ripple's records show £10.4m in members' fees. The administrators have not said how much was for Whitelaw Brae. The co-op, which has about 7,000 members, says it never received any of the money raised. The administrators found £6.88m with a currency exchange firm and ring-fenced it. In July they asked the High Court whether it belongs to members or to Ripple's creditors generally. A first hearing was listed for 23 September. No order has been published, and the co-op says it cannot yet say whether money is missing.

The customer agreement members signed runs to 19 pages. None of them says where the money sat before the wind farm was bought. The share offer lists 21 risks. None covers Ripple failing while holding it.

GB Energy says it will set out plans this autumn for communities to take ownership stakes in renewable projects. Those plans need to answer, in writing, the question Whitelaw Brae members never got answered.

The Bill Buster

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