How does it work?

The Co-operative itself is little more than a legal structure that is used to define how we will all work together. The power behind the Co-operative, is the agreement of its members to all work together to achieve a common goal. At the most basic level, we agree together that we will all switch to buy our energy from the same company. We assign the task of selecting that company, to a group of members that we elect to run the Co-operative on our behalf. All members can nominate to be elected to that group. The larger the group of us that have made this commitment, the more negotiating power we have, as we become representatives of an ever more significant block of energy consumption.

We achieved a deal with Tru Energy that has been described as "extraordinary" by industry insiders. Uptake of that deal by our members helped to shift the energy retail industry in South Australia. The result of our work was to make energy discounting available to all South Australian retail consumers (be they Energy Co-op members or not). Consequently, we have been able to take a step backwards from active membership drives, and simply to monitor the market, making occasional recommendations if and as required. We also try to keep abrest of the latest technologies and news in the energy market generally, which is updated on our homepage regularly.