E.ON offers German customers choice of power mix
Date: 12-Sep-01
Country: GERMANY
Called MixPower, the product, currently the subject of a vigorous media campaign featuring Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and several soccer personalities, aims to tie E.ON's 10.5 million retail customers to the company while also giving E.ON clues about future electricity demand.
"The customer signals which power mix he wants," E.ON spokesman Erwin Haydn told Reuters.
"By offering MixPower, we are taking up the obligation to meet the customers' wishes."
He declined to give customer target figures.
E.ON polls have identified three power buying strategies among the target group for MixPower - one based on price, one on environmental concerns and a third forming a balance between the two, Haydn explained.
Customers would choose a basic model but then could fine-tune the percentage of contributing energy sources within the product mix.
Since they could not actually derive the chosen percentages of various power sources through their electricity socket, E.ON pledges to collate customer wishes and adjust its supplies to the general grid accordingly, Haydn said.
Big shifts in demand would result in the expansion or reduction of the corresponding power sources.
Merged from Veba and Viag last year, E.ON is Germany's biggest utility in terms of market capitalisation before RWE .
It presently feeds into the grid 51 percent of power derived from nuclear plants, 32 percent from hard coal, eight percent from lignite, seven percent hydropower, two percent from gas and oil-fired plants and the rest from other sources.
E.ON's innovative advertising strategies in a saturated retail market with low margins last month suffered a setback when a Munich court told the firm to stop advertising its "Aquapower" product as purely derived from hydropower.