Octopus Agile (Time of Use) tariff

[TonyT 226]

I know but who cares😀

 

likewise who cares about customer care when you just email them and then cancel direct debit

[newhome 2,303]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

WOW  Who is offering 12.5p for all uses 24/7 in Scotland?

EDF Go Electric tariff (for people with electric cars). 

[ProDave 4,476]

13 minutes ago, newhome said:

EDF Go Electric tariff (for people with electric cars). 

And how do they check you actually have an "electric car"?  Will a Hybrid count?

[TonyT 226]

They are probably more interested in how many bedrooms you have and how many people live in the house

[newhome 2,303]

27 minutes ago, ProDave said:

And how do they check you actually have an "electric car"?  Will a Hybrid count?

 
It has to be a plug in hybrid I think. They take the car registration number when you apply but I’m not sure if they actually check the car. I would assume that they do. Mine is a PHEV so qualified even though I barely use the car these days as I work from hold full time at present. 

[SteamyTea 1,794]

It could be a way of fiddling the charging point numbers. Governments like to do that.

[TerryE 792]

@DamonHD, Thanks for the link; the site needs a proper review.

 

IMO some form of demand-side adaptive use is a good tool to help get us towards a zero carbon goal, and ToU pricing is one good mechanism to implement this.  AFAIK, the Octopus Agile tariff is the first such UK offering available to consumers.  I also believe that members of this site -- those with the drive to self-build -- will tend to be early adopters of ToU services. 

 

This particular thread is branching into various facets, because of the various usecases that might apply here, and the sweet spot is going to be different depending on individual circumstances and abilities.  For example in my case, my annual energy bill is about half of my annual council tax bill and my current energy solution doesn't need third party maintenance or material related consumables , so another 30% savings, say, would be a very small change to our overall outgoings.  So to the usecases:

• Many here will have PV and some Tesla PowerWall-style storage.  Maybe more so in the future the "powerwall" will be a flatpack with a wheel at each corner and only plugged in when not taking the occupants out and around 🤣  These are capital intensive and complex systems, and merit a separate thread / discussion, I think.
• At the other extreme, many will find the challenges of adaptive demand to match ToU in the "just too hard" category.  Many will be comfortable with adopting essentially static time-of-day strategies that can be implemented with simple timers etc.  That's what we do to make best use of our current E7 tariff:  Most of CH, all of our DHW, our washing machine and dishwasher use E7 cheap rate electricity, and this drops our energy bill by ~30% compared to an equivalent single rate tariff.
• Where things start to get really complicated is when you wish to adapt your household demand truly dynamically to daily ToU pricing, and one option here seems to be the way OVO is going and to use a third-party (e.g. energy provider) AI-based service and allow it to schedule your devices and internal services through technologies such as Alexa.  This will be the simplest option for many consumers but this one gives me the willies, personally, because of the security, privacy and 3rd-party continuity risks.
• Another alternative is to have a largely independent system within the household the executes control locally and only depends on open (therefore easily replaceable) and usually free external services, but with all of the smarts running on a computer within the household.  I am also IT literate and a strong programmer, so this is the option that I am most comfortable with, and one that I wish to promote and to support /help any other members that are thinking of  going this route, but again perhaps the details merit a separate thread / discussion.  What I will say here is that there is now a bunch of cheap and incredibly powerful options (e.g. RPi, Home Assistant, ZigBee / ZWave and loads of devices that employ these, REST-base webservces) that make this very feasibly for anyone with some IT literacy and very basic programming skills to go this route.

Perhaps others can expand on cases that I have missed.

 

 

 

[Bramco 15]

Useful site - https://www.energy-stats.uk/

 

Simon

[pdf27 122]

3 hours ago, Dan F said:

For us (without a electic car) this tarrif would mean a payment of approx £600 a year.  With the agile tarriff, I'm not even sure how I'd start to calculate what the annual cost would be, because it all depends on dynamic pricing, ability to schedule usage/charging as well as the maximum charge/discharge rate of battery.   Have you managed to estimate costs of agile tariff in any way?

 

Agree 11p/kWh charging is expensive. But, if you export more than you import over the year, then the other way to think about it is simply that your summer excess is covering your winter usage?

I've done a crude spreadsheet-based model which sort-of simulates this: it uses data downloaded from PV Live to work out what my own theoretical generation would be over the past few years, and combines this with historical degree-days to get a rough estimate for solar gain, heat demand and COP. Assuming no electric car and that the average daily price profile applies every day (not particularly accurate, but I haven't figured out anything better yet). Assuming demand of about 4 MWh per year and total generation of about 10 MWh (probably a bit high, but I haven't re-run the model recently) it ends up with a net payment to me of about £250 per year. In practice it would be a bit lower since more heating would be in winter when prices are higher than average, but it's probably reasonably close.

Assuming those numbers are correct, that's about 4p/kWh for net exports of ~6000 kWh. So the Tesla tariff would get me £420 extra per year - nice, but would take a long time to pay off and as soon as an electric car comes into the picture the financial return drops fast. My view is that that money is better spent on more PV or a higher COP heat pump (e.g. GSHP rather than ASHP), but that's very much what suits me rather than a hard and fast set of requirements.

[Dan F 121]

1 hour ago, pdf27 said:

I've done a crude spreadsheet-based model which sort-of simulates this: it uses data downloaded from PV Live to work out what my own theoretical generation would be over the past few years, and combines this with historical degree-days to get a rough estimate for solar gain, heat demand and COP. Assuming no electric car and that the average daily price profile applies every day (not particularly accurate, but I haven't figured out anything better yet). Assuming demand of about 4 MWh per year and total generation of about 10 MWh (probably a bit high, but I haven't re-run the model recently) it ends up with a net payment to me of about £250 per year. In practice it would be a bit lower since more heating would be in winter when prices are higher than average, but it's probably reasonably close.

Assuming those numbers are correct, that's about 4p/kWh for net exports of ~6000 kWh. So the Tesla tariff would get me £420 extra per year - nice, but would take a long time to pay off and as soon as an electric car comes into the picture the financial return drops fast. My view is that that money is better spent on more PV or a higher COP heat pump (e.g. GSHP rather than ASHP), but that's very much what suits me rather than a hard and fast set of requirements.

 

Does this assume battery or no battery?   I assume the "long time to pay off" means your numbrs are without battery and just shifting usage as much as possible?

 

 

[pdf27 122]

15 minutes ago, Dan F said:

Does this assume battery or no battery?   I assume the "long time to pay off" means your numbrs are without battery and just shifting usage as much as possible?

Yep, no battery. Basically it makes a prediction for how much heat and hot water is needed in a given day and from that the number of 30 minute slots that a 3kW heat pump would need to run for to fulfil that. They're then allocated to the cheapest n slots per day. No attempt to time-shift anything else apart from using a hot-fill dishwasher.