Time of Use Tariffs (Half-hourly readings required)

dgp1000

I’m already on a Time of Use tariff - Bulb’s Smart Tariff. After a few hiccups it seems to be working well and saving at pre-21 June increase prices around £5 a month with little or no effort. Given the Smart Tariff hasn’t got up my savings should increase. I don’t have an EV and am retired.

I can download my HHly data, but  there seems to be no price comparison available. This will have to change. Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

I’d be interested in others views.

MWT

dgp1000 said:

Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

That is sample data and yes, it is old, but as the tariff price changes every 30 mins following wholesale prices it is going to be near impossible to actually compare to other tariffs however 'up to date' the information is.

You can spot-check the rates though as the Octopus tariff page does show the price for the current half-hour for your region. Just input your Post Code at the bottom of the page on the following link...

https://octopus.energy/tariffs/

[Deleted User]

dgp1000 said:

I’m already on a Time of Use tariff - Bulb’s Smart Tariff. After a few hiccups it seems to be working well and saving at pre-21 June increase prices around £5 a month with little or no effort. Given the Smart Tariff hasn’t got up my savings should increase. I don’t have an EV and am retired.

I can download my HHly data, but  there seems to be no price comparison available. This will have to change. Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

I’d be interested in others views.

BEIS spent £400K last year to develop a ToU price comparison tool that will import actual HH usage data to calculate which is the cheapest overall tariff. The tool also allows the consumer to look at how tariff choices might change by load shifting: for example, putting the dishwasher et al on overnight. A number of companies, including Hildebrand, were involved in developing the BEIS tool. Some of us have been allowed to have a play with it. No doubt other PCWs are working on their own tools. To access your data, I believe that the organisation has to be a Registered DCC User and the owner of the data has to give access approval which is renewed annually.

MWT

I'm not convinced that the tool will be helpful for dynamic pricing models like Agile though.

You can compare historic data of course but you can't predict the future pricing so for example in September last year Agile would have been the cheapest ToU tariff for a lot of people but that would have turned out to be a significant mistake as the wholesale prices went up considerably in the months that followed.

I do believe the tool is useful for comparing fixed ToU tariffs though...

[Deleted User]

Possibly, but I doubt that Agile will ever go mainstream, and some might well argue that the experiment is over. There cannot be that many consumers left on Agile.

MWT

Dolor said:

Possibly, but I doubt that Agile will ever go mainstream, and some might well argue that the experiment is over. There cannot be that many consumers left on Agile.

It remains a great tariff for net exporters with storage facilities, but yes, I agree it is a small target market.

Main reason I mentioned it though was that is was referenced in the question.

[Deleted User]

dgp1000 said:

 Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

Just to expand on MWT’s comment. As far as Agile is concerned, there is nothing to make available as the Agile prices for the following day are released at about 4pm. As it is a dynamic (ever changing) set of 48 by 30 minute unit prices then no forward comparison can really be made with other fixed ToU tariffs. 

QrizB

dgp1000 said:

Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

I’d be interested in others views.

Octopus make their live tariff data available, I'm not sure what makes you think they don't.

Two places to view it online are https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/ or https://agileprices.co.uk/ (the former has graphs, the latter uses coloured boxes; the data is the same in each case).

MWT

QrizB said:

dgp1000 said:

Even Octopus don’t make their up to date Agile Tariff available, it’s a year old so useless for comparing.

I’d be interested in others views.

Octopus make their live tariff data available, I'm not sure what makes you think they don't.

Two places to view it online are https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/ or https://agileprices.co.uk/ (the former has graphs, the latter uses coloured boxes; the data is the same in each case).

Just to be clear, neither of those sites are official Octopus sites, they both use the Octopus API to obtain their data.

I do think Octopus might do a little more to make the data visible to potential customers on their own website...

QrizB

MWT said:

Just to be clear, neither of those sites are official Octopus sites, they both use the Octopus API to obtain their data.

I do think Octopus might do a little more to make the data visible to potential customers on their own website...

I agree with you on that point, definitely.

[Deleted User]

QrizB said:

MWT said:

Just to be clear, neither of those sites are official Octopus sites, they both use the Octopus API to obtain their data.

I do think Octopus might do a little more to make the data visible to potential customers on their own website...

I agree with you on that point, definitely.

What data? Bearing in mind that it changes every 30 minutes. Most tariff price comparisons are based on forward prices. How would any supplier address this particular problem with respect to Tracker or Agile? It is a bit like asking what the share price of company A will be in 3 month’s time? Past performance is no indicator of future prices as the majority of us who have been on Agile have found out.

FWiW, 2 years ago, I switched to Go and then monitored my actual Go cost for two months and compared it to what it would have been on Agile, and then switched to Agile. Continuous monitoring of the average unit cost persuaded me to switch back to Go in October last year. High Agile prices indicate to me that Go or Go Faster are the tariffs to be on.