They would say that wouldn't they?

Energy switching sites have a vested interest in sowing fear and confusion:

The average household energy bill could nudge £5,000 a year by 2020 if current price trends continue, nearly four times the present level, research from online switching service uSwitch.com warns.

The key here is "if current trends continue". As Keynes famously said, on current trends we'll all be dead.

What if the current trend is more like the 35% increase in US gas production over two  years is replicated internationally?  It's too early in the morning to do the math, but that should mean prices below £100 by 2020 - an equally ridiculous assertion.

What if the wholesale price for one year gas from this day last year to today moved down from 94.44 pence per therm to 49 as it has?  Why don't we go on those current trends?  Then we should, in theory, see last year's increase on domestic prices evaporate.

But will we see those prices move down?  Not with a no-touch-at-all regulatory regime from Ofgem combined with lazy journalists putting rubbish like this on the front page.

The true story is that prices should be coming down, and that that would give £500 a year back to domestic customers.  Another story is that LED lighting will mean 20% of electricity demand evaporates.  Another story is that smart metering can cause at least a 5% drop in demand by 2020, a very conservative estimate.  Throw in another conservative estimate, here from National Grid, a rather more disinterested view, that combine a new gas glut with new transmission technologies and smart metering and

... taking these steps could free up another 8 gigabytes of energy.  “The way we operate and the way the electricity market operates is likely to change,” said the report.  “The way that consumers, large and small may interact with the market may also change considerably.”

Now that last sentence explains the fear that some suppliers and every switching site has:  if consumers, large and small, interact with the market simply by paying wholesale prices plus transportation plus margin as over 80% of US and Canadian consumers do, then the entire business case of energy consultants and switching sites disappears as The Economist reported earlier this year.

Nowhere in the world are such sites so influential...Not everyone is delighted about the rise of these sites. Their revenues come from commission on products they recommend...

And more to the point, do newspapers truly have a dis-interested view?:

Some particularly resent the way sites style themselves consumer champions, rather than paid introducers (a notion that newspapers seldom question, since most use the comparison companies to power parts of their own websites)