Octopus AGILE and other tarriffs tied to wholesale rates.

Dave_c_v

Hi - Has anyone been following the Texas freeze fiasco?  One of the problems was that many users were on tarrifs like Octopus Agile which is tied to the wholsale rates for electricity. Which is great in normal times. During the freeze the Texas unconstrained wholesale pricing system put the prices up 70% or more and passed this on to the users. People ended up with bills for a couple of weeks of 16,000 dollars!  All this money quickly extracted from their credit cards on a daily basis!  So I was wondering what it would take for the UK to end up in such a storm and AGILE users being burnt as there is no upper limit on what you can be charged.  It could be for some reason all the nuclear is taken off line due to some new technical issue and we are in a high pressure weather system with no wind power. I haven't contacted Octopus yet but was just wondering whether anyone had made the connection with our smart meter tarrifs and the problems in Texas?  Dave.

MWT

You are incorrect, Agile prices are capped at 35p/kWh so the Texas situation could not happen...

MWT

There are other unique aspects to the Texas situation like their complete lack of winterization of the grid and their voluntary isolation of their grid from other States.

It was a failure of investment, planning and preparation even though there had been previous warnings about the risks.

Because they are not integrated into the US grid they were not forced to fix the previously identified problems, and eventually they have paid the price, or at least some of the customers have...

In 'normal' times I spend a lot of my time in Texas, and their lack of preparedness for anything that looks like winter is a running joke.

This time it wasn't so funny...