Octopus Agile

teaselMay

I suspect it is something like that. If you think 30-40 years ago the ad break in Corrie caused a surge that the power stations prepared for a car plant or foundry could feasably have a similar impact

Telegraph_Sam

Is it worth going upstream to Nordpool & co when I get next day alerts automatically from gastracker?

masonic

Telegraph_Sam said:

Is it worth going upstream to Nordpool & co when I get next day alerts automatically from gastracker?

For Agile, Nordpool is the place to go for advanced notice of next day hour by hour pricing. For Tracker, it only gives about an hour's advanced notice vs Gastracker.

Telegraph_Sam

Agile or Tracker Feb 2025 (?) I'd really want to have a steer on the next day's prices rather than a 1/2 hour by 1/2 hour news broadcast

masonic

Telegraph_Sam said:

Agile or Tracker Feb 2025 (?) I'd really want to have a steer on the next day's prices rather than a 1/2 hour by 1/2 hour news broadcast

On Agile, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive half hour in a single day can be substantial.

Bendo

Pat38493 said:

northernstar007 said:

looking excellent for tomorrow (saturday)

I am sort of considering trying to switch back to Agile tomorrow after changing to Go on the 10th December - some posters have claimed that Octopus systems are no longer enforcing the 30 day cool down.

However, it looks like the wind forecast for the second half of next week is getting worse again so I might leave it till early Jan, especially given that family might well decide to do a lot of cooking at peak rates next week - I doubt I will be able to dictate Xmas cooking times based on agile slots!

The demand should also be significantly lower next week so the wind speed being lower may not have as big an impact.

pete-20-11

Some negative pricing overnight tonight and one at the end of tomorrow's data too. 

wrf12345

OMG, have to get the hoover out tomorrow and mega protein/carrot cake microwave session (carrots at 10p a kilo in Morrisons a couple of days ago), I too have a reasonable s/c so reluctant to lose that by changing when we had those extended peak days - just hoping Octopus will get ahead of the zero s/c game before the end of Feb when my first year runs out. Probably going to save about a hundred quid over the twelve months (very low user so that is a major achievement) but alas lost the winter fuel allowance which covered my actual gas usage but so far have spent less than a fiver on gas, saving the savings for when it gets really cold. Possibly I will break even overall.

Pat38493

Telegraph_Sam said:

Agile or Tracker Feb 2025 (?) I'd really want to have a steer on the next day's prices rather than a 1/2 hour by 1/2 hour news broadcast

On Nordpool you will find the hourly prices for the following day, and if you know what you are doing, you can create a spreadsheet that calculates the exact tracker price for the next day, based on that information, but you have to convert it to the correct units and know the Octopus formula.

You will not find a headline rate that's comparable to the single Tracker rate on the Nordpool site - you would have to calculate something.

The other auction happens in the afternoon and is for 30 minute slots and that is the one that drives Agile, you would have to manually apply the Octopus formula to the results to get the actual numbers.

Usually, the 30 minute slots from Agile, turn out very similar within each hour, to the hourly prices from Nordpool tracker, unless something unexpected happened between 10am and 3pm like a major outage or suchlike.

The hourly nordpool prices drive pricing predictor engines like Octopus Compare, but I am not sure why, in Octopus Compare, the predicted prices for the following day are not identical for each hour - I guess they must know that based on past history, one or other of the 30 minute slots is likely to be more or less e.g. 7am to 7.30am is almost always more expensive than 7.30am to 8am. 

Telegraph_Sam

That's the very point. I'm not inclined to spend hours jumping through hoops creating formulas etc in order to do on spreadsheets what you say - for what may turn out to be very little net gain.  If I move to Agile, depending on my consumption profile I have to take what the system dictates or pay the penalty. This represents the "intangible" advantage of Tracker over Agile which could justify some sort of a premium in comparisons. I suppose that in some ways Compare can manage this though how competently ...  taking account of comments in this forum. You could argue that Tracker is more lifestyle-friendly.