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UTILITY WEEK | 29Th AUgUsT - 4Th sEpTEmbEr 2014 | 3 Leader Ellen Bennett This week 4 | Seven days 6 | People & Opinion 8 | Interview Chris gauld, managing director, spark 12 | Special report The outlook for Drax 14 Policy & Regulation 14 | News Ofwat to rule on business plans 15 | Analysis CMA inquiry first salvoes 18 | Market view Abstraction reform 19 Finance & Investment 19 | News UK's £10m boost for tidal project 21 | Analysis rIIO EDI bites DNOs 21 | Investor view James Wilson 22 Operations & Assets 22 | High viz Wrc trial 23 | Pipe up paul mullord 24 | Market view Computer simulation 25 | Market view securing remote locations 26 Customers 26 | News Failure to deal with complaints costs EDF Energy £3m 27 | Market view The service game is key 28 Markets & Trading 28 | News reform carbon market, say manufacturers 30 Community 30 | Subscriber focus Lis Blunsdon, Hogan Lovells 31 | Disconnector Regulatory minefield is a barrier to entry Do two wrongs make a right? Generally not, but the story of Spark – the small energy supplier we interview this week on page 8 – poses an interesting conundrum. At first glance, the supplier is a politician's dream: an entrepreneurial start-up spotting a gap in the market and taking on the big six. Look a bit closer, though, and wor- rying details emerge. The company is under investigation by Ofgem for switching customers with histories of bad debt to larger suppliers without the customers' knowledge. As regulatory breaches go, this is pretty flagrant. Chris Gauld, the managing director, acknowledges mistakes were made, insists they have been rectified, and says the company has now grown up and moved on. It's tempting to be harsh on Spark – and the company has cer- tainly come under fire in the mainstream press, including featuring on a BBC Watchdog documentary. But Spark, which now has 200 employees, at the time of the breach had far fewer – and no well- staffed compliance department. Yet multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees and access to the world's best regulatory lawyers have consistently flouted consumer protection rules to the point where they have had to pay out tens of millions of pounds in fines and compensation – yes, big six, we're talking about you. No, two wrongs don't make a right – but can it be fair to expect higher standards of compliance from start-up businesses with straitened resources than we do from the industry's leaders? Such behaviour is unacceptable from either, of course, but Spark's experi- ence does highlight one of the major challenges faced by would-be market entrants. Not only do they face the hurdles of the wholesale market, they also have to negotiate Byzantine regulation that some of the world's biggest businesses can't manage to stay on the right side of. The barrier to entry this raises is one of those unintended consequences of regulation that the Competition and Markets Authority will need to examine in its inquiry into the market (see page 15). If it is decided that a diverse and competitive market is the best solution to the crisis around energy supply (and that is not a foregone conclusion), then surely some extra support should be provided for those smaller market entrants that will make up the competition. Ellen Bennett, Editor ellen.bennett@fav-house.com gAs 19 | News North sea forecasts trounce earlier predictions 22 | High viz Wrc gas pipeline trial 28 | News price drops 43 per cent 28 | News UK gas storage nearly full WATEr 14 | News Ofwat to rule on business plans 18 | Market view Absraction reform 23 | Pipe up paul mullord 26 | News Thames still at bottom of sIm league ELECTrICITY 12 | Special report Drax 19 | News bloomberg gloomy on tidal and wave 19 | News Fund invests £90m in more wind assets 21 | Analysis rIIO EDI cuts hit DNOs 21 | Investor view James Wilson ENErgY 8| Interview Chris gauld, spark 15 | Analysis CmA inquiry 24 | Market view Computer simulation 25 | Market view securing remote locations 26 | News big six absent from table of best deals 27 | Market view Utilities must win their service games Knowledge worth keeping Visit the Downloads section of Utility Week's website http://www.utilityweek.co.uk/ downloads Smartest Energy: Energy Entrepreneurs Report http://bit.ly/1kzddrn IBM: Smarter Asset Management http://bit.ly/Xx7myx