I Hate Standing Charges.

DaveCartledge

|I'm a low user of energy with solar panels.  I'm currently on a fixed deal with no standing charges for gas and electric which ends on April 1st.  Does any supplier still offer a deal with no standing charges.  I begrudge paying up to £20 a month extra for zero energy usage when out at work or asleep, especially when my account is in credit paying £21 a month.
Thanks in anticipation,

Dave

GingerTim

I don't think any do now - and fear that zero standing charge tariffs are a thing of the past, at least in the short to medium term.

Astria

Unfortunately I think a lot of energy companies have scrapped zero standing charges for this reason - they are still paying for the infrastructure to your house but getting nothing back.

If you have zero import from the grid then you can pay to be disconnected (no supplier) however, assuming you have batteries to store energy collected during the day.

MWT

Even if you are a net exporter you still need the infrastructure to allow the export, and unless your array is huge, you still probably have days over winter when you need to import, so going 'off-grid' completely probably isn't on the cards.

There was until recently at least a theoretical possibility to get onto a British Gas tariff (Zero Fixed October 2022). It shouldn't have been possible, but a good number of people have managed it.

Search on here for more details.

QrizB

DaveCartledge said:

... I begrudge paying up to £20 a month extra for zero energy usage when out at work or asleep, especially when my account is in credit paying £21 a month.

FWIW it's the standing charge for a dual-fuel account is currently £15/month on a capped variable tariff, half that if single-fuel. Also your £21/month energy cost could double when your fix expires in April, so be prepared for your bill to end up somewhere over £50/month.

Verdigris

I begrudge paying up to £20 a month extra for zero energy usage when out at work or asleep, especially when my account is in credit paying £21 a month.

Go entirely off-grid, then, and compare the amortised cost maintaining enough storage to ensure a constant supply in winter.

I think the standing charge is a bargain, to allow you to generate most of your energy needs but still have somewhere to export and get paid for your surplus, whilst being able to draw off outside sources when the sun doesn't shine. Being able to access cheap off-peak electricity is a further bonus.

JJ_Egan

I hate the alterative to standing charges .Extra price on first xxx units each day .

wild666

I also hate the standing charges, why the charges aren't divided by average usage and put on to the price per kWh I'll never know. Low users would benefit and high user would not benefit. 
If people were asked what option they would like, I think it would be a bit like the referendum result a slight win for those who are low users. 
3p per kWh on electric might seem a lot to some but to a low user, like myself, it could reduce the electric bill by £50 per year and the gas bill by more as the price added to a kWh would be less than 1p. 
Some days I use less than 1.8 kWh whilst other days I use 7.7 kWh, or more, averaging out at 1500 to 1600 kWh per year. 
The downside to the average usage is that suppliers could set their own average usage and that could be anywhere from 1500 to 5000 kWh per year or higher. 

If the UK ends up with all electric heating then it will be a winner for the utility companies as more electric will be used and the standing charge based on kWh usage will rocket. More electric used so the standing charge on electric could be a lot more than double what we see now for an electric and gas standing charge. 

ollythecollie

I have my electricity on the Clean VE 3.0 tariff from Outfox The Market.  I've been on it for getting towards four years, so I don't know if it's still available to new customers, and nor have I any idea about their current offerings.  However, when the cap was raised in the autumn they deleted the standing charge and raised the energy rate to 24.059p per kWh at all times.  This put my monthly up from fifty-eight to eighty quid, though obviously there's potential more easily to reduce my bill through reduction in usage, because of the lack of a daily charge.  If it remains an option it may suit your usage pattern well.

Incidentally, ever since I have had it, the tariff always showed up as the cheapest for me in comparisons, until late spring last year, when a couple of others beat it.  I decided to wait and see what happened over the next few months, and by late September the cheaper options were gone.  Possibly extinct, for all I know.  Since then only Neon Reef offered a cheaper monthly, at sixty-four quid, but they are now gone, and their website said my meter is incompatible anyhow.  Every other monthly quote since has been upwards of a hundred and thirty-seven.  So I'm happy I stayed where I am.

Hope you find your zero standing charge solution.

QrizB

ollythecollie said:

... they deleted the standing charge and raised the energy rate to 24.059p per kWh at all times.  This put my monthly up from fifty-eight to eighty quid

That's about 330kWh/month, 4000kWh/yr. On one of the big suppliers' current capped SVT of 21p/kWh plus 25p/day you'd be paying £74/month. Your zero standing chage tariff is costing you £6/month.

[Deleted User]

DaveCartledge said:

|I'm a low user of energy with solar panels.  I'm currently on a fixed deal with no standing charges for gas and electric which ends on April 1st.  Does any supplier still offer a deal with no standing charges.  I begrudge paying up to £20 a month extra for zero energy usage when out at work or asleep, especially when my account is in credit paying £21 a month.
Thanks in anticipation,

Dave

This graphic shows the breakdown of an average electricity bill. Note that 60p in the £1 we pay has nothing to do with the wholesale price of electricity. There was talk a year or so ago that Ofgem was looking at introducing additional Grid distribution costs for PV solar generators. The spare electricity has to go somewhere and someone has to maintain the Grid infrastructure.

 As it happens, I use less than 800kWhs/year from the Grid. A month or so, I reported to my DNO that I was seeing high voltage on my PV solar inverter. The DNO came out and tested the Grid Supply; fitted a voltage recorder; reviewed the results, and they are coming out next week to fit a voltage tap to my local transformer.

Zero standing charge tariffs proved to be a poor business model when gas users switched across to them in the summer along with electricity users with PV solar.