Airtricity to buy North gas supplier

Airtricity is set to boost its presence in the North by taking over the business of the region’s leading residential gas supplier Phoenix Supply.

The move sees British utility SSE, which owns Airtricity, expand its Irish operations through the £19.1 million (€24m) acquisition of Phoenix.

SSE — formerly known as Scottish and Southern Energy — plans to subsume Phoenix into the growing Airtricity business, which formally entered Northern Ireland’s domestic electricity market in 2010 and has since become one of the region’s fastest growing energy companies with over 100,000 electricity customers switching to its service in under two years.