There's a question that comes up often when we're talking with potential customers: if tem charges less, where does the saving come from?

Is someone else paying more so you can pay less?

Peeling back the layers of a traditional energy bill

When a business pays an energy bill, it's paying for several different things bundled into one number.

Some of those costs are industry charges — network fees, balancing charges, levies — that every business in the country pays. They cover the physical cost of moving electricity across the grid, keeping supply stable, and funding the policy commitments baked into the system.

Then there are the other layers. The traders and retail intermediaries that sit between the generator producing electricity and the business consuming it. Each one takes a cut. None of them add electricity to the grid. Their cost shows up on your bill all the same.

In a traditional setup, a business doesn't just pay for energy. It pays for everyone who handled the transaction along the way.

Cutting the inefficiencies

What a customer pays with tem reflects a truer cost of energy — not a version that's been marked up at every step of the chain.

We’ve removed a lot of the intermediary layers — not by negotiating harder, but by replacing the manual processes that made them necessary in the first place.

These exist because the traditional wholesale system was built around manual processes, specialist go-betweens, and layers of financial cover for risk passed from party to party. The technology we run handles the same job at a fraction of the cost. The margin those intermediaries were capturing goes back to the people actually producing and consuming the electricity.

And what about generators?

What is different in our relationship with generators is what happens in the transaction space: tem strips out value leakage and returns more of the value of the power to the people generating it.

In the traditional route to market, there are often layers of intermediaries taking opaque margins. Those margins can be hard to see — but they still come out of the generator’s earnings, reducing the return they ultimately receive for the electricity they produce.

tem removes those intermediaries on the generator side just as we do on the business side, so more of the value taken from the transaction stays where it belongs — with the generator. By removing and reducing these transaction layers, we’re able to share more of this value on both sides of the chain: generators can see more clearly what their energy is worth, and businesses pay closer to the true cost.

It also matters for the UK’s renewable buildout. When generators receive fairer, more transparent returns — without opaque margins eating into revenues — the economics of building more renewable capacity start to work in the right direction.

So who loses out?

The intermediaries. The traders who were paid to manage complexity and risk that technology now handles better. The retail layers that marked up costs without adding a single watt to the grid.

The energy market spent decades building complexity that justified its own existence. Every layer of handling added a cost that businesses had no way to see, let alone challenge. We replaced that structure with technology, so the value that used to fund the middlemen now reaches the people who actually produce and consume the electricity.

Putting it simply

Think about the payments world. If you pay someone internationally through a traditional chain, the money can pass through multiple layers — processors, trading desks, risk buffers, and margin — each taking a cut along the way. The result: the sender pays more, the recipient gets less, and the underlying payment is still the same.

tem is the modern, simplified route for energy. What changes is what happens around the trade: there’s fewer layers taking a slice before it reaches the people using the power — or those producing it.

If you want to see what this all looks like on your bill, get in touch.