I've just re-quoted on "Meercats". Cheapest deals for me are still in the £125-130 p/m range (Utility Warehouse, London Power, bulb, EDF) but they're all variable rate so will probably go up once the price cap is lifted.
Cheapest fixes are £150/pm (Sainsbury, eon) and they're all for 2 years. Cheapest 1 year's are £160-£165 (Scottish Power, Octopus).
Can't do anything about it now, but the fact that two year fixes are cheaper than one year makes me think the suppliers are expecting prices to rise in the short term, and then fall after year 1. I'm not sure whether it's wise to lock into a 2 year deal under those circumstances.
It's all a gamble.
So the difference between a one year fix and a two year is £10-15 a month. Not worth losing sleep over, I'd go for the two year.
I'm paying OctopusEnergy £150 a month now, and that's on a two year fix from last April. I dread to think what I'd be paying on a variable rate.
Variable rate is actually the cheapest at the moment, and has been for the past 6 months or so. Of course, we don't actually know what the variable rate will be tomorrow, never mind in two years time, so no way of knowing what the correct decision will be until two years time.
It's a bit like taking out an 8% 10 year fixed mortgage in 2007. 8% may well have looked like a good rate if you were looking backwards at what happened in the previous 10 years, but if you could have looked into the future you would know it might be a poor deal.
It seems part of the problem is being caused by renewables - particularly wind. On a good day, wind can provide close to 50% of the UK's electrical power. On a bad day, close to zero. On the bad days we have to burn gas to make up the shortfall, and August & September have been 'calm' so we've been using more gas than planned. Also 5 of out 8 nuclear power stations are currently either off line or have faults, so nuclear power generation is down. That in turn has pushed up the wholesale price of gas. Gas supply can be increased, but not rapidly enough to cope with the demands placed on it by the weather.
Sounds like someone needs to tell the greenies to eff off, dig up Arthur Scargill and re-open the mines