Case study
A broker-arranged contract, taken apart line by line.
A regional Western Australian business runs a dozen contestable sites on one retail contract, arranged through an energy broker. Ahead of renewal, it asked us for an independent read on what that electricity actually costs to supply.
What we found
Four numbers on one contract.
Every figure below is Eureka's own estimate from the assessment, expressed per year - see the status note further down.
We rebuilt the retailer's side of the numbers using our own cost-of-supply model - the same model several WA retailers lease from us - fed by our monthly energy price forecast: PoE 10, 50 and 90 price views for every 30-minute trading interval, refreshed every month. Run per site and rolled up across the portfolio, it reconstructs what a retailer's price at renewal should look like, rather than what this one happened to be.
$74,000/yr
Margin headroom at renewal
The retailer's margin embedded in the current pricing runs to roughly $104,000 a year, against a fair, competitively-won margin closer to $30,000 - headroom identified for the renewal negotiation.
$5,000/yr
A commission presented as free
The broker who arranged the contract is paid by the retailer, not the client - built into the tariff at around the industry-norm 0.3 c/kWh. Undisclosed, that's a conflict of interest - and some retailers won't deal with a broker at all, which shrinks the field competing for the load.
$13,500/yr
Certificates priced well above market
Large-scale Generation Certificates are passed through at $55/MWh while the market has been trading closer to $10 - about 0.75 c/kWh more than the certificates actually cost.
$11,000/yr
One instruction, no new contract
The portfolio's largest site sits on a legacy Western Power network tariff. Moving it to the cost-reflective alternative is a single instruction to the existing retailer - and two smaller sites can add a further ~$3,700 a year from April 2027.
Identified across the portfolio
~$90,000/yr
Close to $90,000 a year identified, against a contract whose retailer prepays around $119,000 in security - roughly a quarter of the contract's cost of supply. This is the assessment's own overall figure, not a simple sum of the four findings above.
How we work differently
We declare everything to everybody.
Eureka is paid by the client, and only by the client - at the client's discretion, and never by a retailer. Every retailer we help a client approach hears that from us directly.
We aren't a broker and we don't sell electricity. When a broker's commission is buried in a tariff without being said out loud, that's not how we work - and it's worth knowing about even when the number itself is small, because it says something about who else is being paid to bring you a particular retailer.
If a broker arranged your supply and told you it was free, it's worth finding out what you're actually paying for it. That question is what started this assessment, and it's the same question we'd start with on any contract.
This assessment is still in progress, delivered in stages - baseline, then network, then the remaining components. The figures above are Eureka's own identified and estimated findings from that work, not results achieved: the renewal hasn't happened yet.
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If you buy electricity through a broker, a retailer, or both, we'll look at what it actually costs to supply and tell you what we find.