surge pricing

c_smith

    I can just see it in my house.  "Right everyone, it's half past 9, time to go for a shower for school in the morning, get your hair dried and straightened". 

For people living alone and willing to monitor it I can see this as a great way of saving money, but in a household with multiple occupants, particularly kids who have no concept of bills and are used to doing their own thing, it could be difficult. 

Having said that, based on the costs shown above, if you can avoid high usage items during the 1600 to 1830 period, the prices are still much cheaper than the current energy price cap. 

icsys

c_smith said:

My concern with this is what is referred to as "surge pricing".  I've seen in some reports that energy suppliers could change the tariffs up to 48 times a day depending on how great the demand is.  If that's the case, how on earth can anyone plan to save money as you will never know when the "peak" times are.  Such a scheme would not be about customers saving money, but an excuse for suppliers to rip customers off.  If its "time of use" with clearly defined peak periods that you can limit your usage, that's different.  

I'm due to have smart meters fitted next week and now I'm thinking of cancelling them until I have more information about this.  

This 'surge' pricing will be the norm soon... whether you want it or not!

"Ofgem will be granted new powers in May allowing it to change the way smart meters operate, so that data about usage is sent to suppliers every 30 minutes by default.

Suppliers will be able to use the data to change consumer energy prices as much as 48 times per day, allowing them to charge households more at peak times."

Huge smart meter shake-up confirmed

So... that will be the end of 'fixed rate' deals !

QrizB

c_smith said:

And do those times and costs vary much based on your experience? Also, how are you informed, is it via an app or an email? 
Do they keep you informed as to your average cost, if so, how often, or do you need to work it out yourself? 

Octopus Go is a fixed 4-hour cheap period, similar to the fixed 7-hour cheap period on a trad E7 tariff. Rates on Go are fixed for a year.

Octopus Agile has 48 charging periods through the day, as illustrated in the screencap. In each of those periods the price per kWh is based on the wholesale price, which itself is based on the balance of demand and suppply. It could be a maximum of 35p/kWh but there's no minimum; occasionally they have "plunge pricing" where the price is negative and they pay *you* to use electricity.

You are told by 4pm the day before. I don't have Agile so I don't know exactly how you are notified but sites like agileprices.co.uk aggregate the prices and share them for everyone to see.

For Octopus Go, each monthly bill includes a statement of your average unit cost for the period. It also includes a page for every day of the month showing exactly how much energy you've used in each of those 48 half-hour slots.

bristolleedsfan

c_smith said:

Having said that, based on the costs shown above, if you can avoid high usage items during the 1600 to 1830 period, the prices are still much cheaper than the current energy price cap. 

Reality is for months Octopus Agile tariff has been at or very close to 35p all day more often than not for months, these are not carefully selected dates to make a positive point, merely yesterday and today as examples.

QrizB

bristolleedsfan said:

c_smith said:

Having said that, based on the costs shown above, if you can avoid high usage items during the 1600 to 1830 period, the prices are still much cheaper than the current energy price cap. 

Reality is for months Octopus Agile tariff has been at or very close to 35p all day more often than not for months, these are not carefully selected dates to make a positive point, merely yesterday and today as examples.

I was careful to state:

Already happens if you choose Octopus Agile. Here's a screenshot from https://agileprices.co.uk showing the pricing on the 2nd of January this year (the prices are not typical of the whole year to date, but it shows the general idea):

Here's the past seven days, taken from https://www.energy-stats.uk

You can see cheap (admittedly not free) electricity on Sunday morning. And do bear in mind that the April cap will be around 28p/kWh.

wakeupalarm

icsys said:

This 'surge' pricing will be the norm soon... whether you want it or not!

"Ofgem will be granted new powers in May allowing it to change the way smart meters operate, so that data about usage is sent to suppliers every 30 minutes by default.

Suppliers will be able to use the data to change consumer energy prices as much as 48 times per day, allowing them to charge households more at peak times."

Huge smart meter shake-up confirmed

So... that will be the end of 'fixed rate' deals !

Surely it's should be "as much as 50 times per day"
Before Ofgem are granted powers, I hope they consider those days when we put the clocks back.

MWT

wakeupalarm said:

icsys said:

This 'surge' pricing will be the norm soon... whether you want it or not!

"Ofgem will be granted new powers in May allowing it to change the way smart meters operate, so that data about usage is sent to suppliers every 30 minutes by default.

Suppliers will be able to use the data to change consumer energy prices as much as 48 times per day, allowing them to charge households more at peak times."

Huge smart meter shake-up confirmed

So... that will be the end of 'fixed rate' deals !

Surely it's should be "as much as 50 times per day"
Before Ofgem are granted powers, I hope they consider those days when we put the clocks back.

The quote is wrong anyway, the data is not sent to the suppliers every 30 mins, once a day they retrieve 48 half-hour data points.

The data is time-stamped and follows GMT/UTC regardless of BST changes so it is still always 48 data points every 24 hours.

It is only the presentation of the data to customers that has to take account of BST.

Gerry1

MWT said:

wakeupalarm said:

icsys said:

This 'surge' pricing will be the norm soon... whether you want it or not!

"Ofgem will be granted new powers in May allowing it to change the way smart meters operate, so that data about usage is sent to suppliers every 30 minutes by default.

Suppliers will be able to use the data to change consumer energy prices as much as 48 times per day, allowing them to charge households more at peak times."

Huge smart meter shake-up confirmed

So... that will be the end of 'fixed rate' deals !

Surely it's should be "as much as 50 times per day"
Before Ofgem are granted powers, I hope they consider those days when we put the clocks back.

The quote is wrong anyway, the data is not sent to the suppliers every 30 mins, once a day they retrieve 48 half-hour data points.

Out of interest, if you opt for monthly smart meter readings, do they retrieve 1344, 1440 or 1488 data points corresponding to 28, 30 or 31 days?

The official propaganda is always very evasive about this.

Oxy1

I always knew that Smart Meters are a very bad idea.

I did not really think they would come up with this ridiculous idea of prices changing several times per hour. But privacy wise, why would you want several small and large companies to know when you boiled a kettle or flashed the toilet? To know when you are at home and when you are not?

Surely this data will be abused by everyone including:
1. companies
2. authorities of various kind
3. criminals (and not just burglars - many other types of crime would find that data useful).

MWT

Gerry1 said:

MWT said:

wakeupalarm said:

icsys said:

This 'surge' pricing will be the norm soon... whether you want it or not!

"Ofgem will be granted new powers in May allowing it to change the way smart meters operate, so that data about usage is sent to suppliers every 30 minutes by default.

Suppliers will be able to use the data to change consumer energy prices as much as 48 times per day, allowing them to charge households more at peak times."

Huge smart meter shake-up confirmed

So... that will be the end of 'fixed rate' deals !

Surely it's should be "as much as 50 times per day"
Before Ofgem are granted powers, I hope they consider those days when we put the clocks back.

The quote is wrong anyway, the data is not sent to the suppliers every 30 mins, once a day they retrieve 48 half-hour data points.

Out of interest, if you opt for monthly smart meter readings, do they retrieve 1344, 1440 or 1488 data points corresponding to 28, 30 or 31 days?

The official propaganda is always very evasive about this.

If you opt for monthly only then the supplier will get one reading which they can use to create your bills.

The exceptions to that are the ones you'd expect, for example, if you are leaving or joining a supplier in the middle of a month they can take a daily index reading for that day to produce the bill correctly.

Also if you raise a query with the supplier that requires the data to answer the question then they can access it for that purpose.

... but... to access half-hour data they need your permission.

This level of control is relatively easy to manage as the meter stores two completely separate datasets.

For imports, it has 2 years of daily meter index readings in one dataset, and 13 months of daily half-hour data.

So the supplier does not need to access half-hour data to generate a daily meter index for billing.