accelerating growth in generation

The pace of growth across our portfolio continued to strengthen with a particularly significant increase seen in renewable generation.

During the year, electricity volumes purchased from our generation customers rose by 15% to 5.5TWh from 540 generation sites, an increase of 21% on the previous year.

Renewable volumes expanded by 50% to 3TWh and made up more than half (54%) of our total generation volumes purchased - up from 41% in 2009/10 - with technologies such as onshore wind and landfill gas showing some of the strongest increases.

The portfolio also benefitted from the introduction of the Feed-in Tariffs (FiT) scheme at the beginning of April 2010. We fully embraced the potential of the FiT scheme to help encourage a new wave of energy entrepreneurs in the UK.

In its first full year we paid out £1.75m to generators which, according to figures released by Ofgem in August, was more than any other electricity company.

During the year we also saw a number of large customers sign long term agreements or place increased volumes with us. We agreed a new two-year
agreement with Infinis, one of the UK’s leading generators of renewable power and a long-standing customer of SmartestEnergy, covering the output from 38 landfill gas sites across the UK, totalling around 40MW of capacity.

Leading Swedish developer Vattenfall also signed a Power Purchase Agreement for its 41.4MW Edinbane wind farm on the Isle of Skye, the first
onshore wind farm it has built since acquiring AMEC Wind Energy in 2008.