The year is 1968. You’re an Olympic high-jumper about to take your shot at a medal. But first up is an American, Dick Fosbury.

(Stay with me here)

Fosbury runs up as usual, but when he leaps, he spins his body and launches over the frame back-first, clearing the bar with room to spare.

The Fosbury flop, what will become a staple of secondary school P.E lessons, is born. In an instant, everything you knew about your discipline, the very fundamentals of your sport are upended.

Fosbury has changed the game. Same bar, but a completely new approach to getting over it.

Energy’s bar

Smash cut to energy.

For a business, the bar to clear is obvious: get hold of energy at the best possible price. The jump is how you get there. And right now, most businesses make the same jump.

Get a quote. Sign up with a utility company on that price.

Underneath the price – the mechanics of the jump, if you will – is a chain running from generator to trader to wholesale desk to supplier to end user. Each link in that chain adds a fee. By the time a price reaches a bill, up to 30% of it can be made up of charges accumulated along the way, unexplained and, on the whole, unauditable.

Clearing the bar isn’t negotiable. Livelihoods and customers rely on it happening. But as the bar creeps up, as energy prices do the same, the cost of getting over it can become more and more of a burden.

A complex jump

The complexity behind how energy is bought and sold hasn’t just crept in. The chain was built by an industry that wanted to manage risk and extract a margin at every step along it. The goal, it’s fair to say, wasn’t to make the price transparent to the business paying it at the end.

This is opacity by design, not by accident.

It's also a design built for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Forty years ago, pricing energy meant a handful of large, slow-moving players trading on imperfect information, so a market full of intermediaries absorbing risk on everyone's behalf sort of made sense.

But that's not the world we're pricing energy into today. The forecasting and computation that now exist mean the risk those layers were built to absorb can be priced directly, without them.

A different jump

At tem, we don’t want businesses to make a better jump, we want them to make another kind of jump entirely.

Rosso, tem's energy transaction infrastructure, is what makes that possible. It doesn't try to negotiate a better position inside the wholesale chain, it skips the chain entirely.

Rosso forecasts, fulfils, optimises and prices every transaction across our portfolio of thousands of generators and businesses rather than routing through the wholesale market and the web of intermediaries sitting within it. The end result is a business energy bill up to 30% lower than average.

Sticking the landing

Can I stick the landing of this analogy? Let’s give it a go.

Fosbury re-thought the fundamentals of his sport. He thought things could be done differently, better. We have the same opinion about the energy market. We’re not content to default to the way things have always been done, we’re changing things from the ground up.

When you learn to make a different jump, where you land is only tethered by your ambition.