Octopus Agile prices from 1st July

Qyburn

QrizB said:

Storing power is really quite expensive. To take an example that's commonly used at home this Pylontech battery can store 3kWh and (at time of writing) costs a little under £1200. At the peak of negative pricing today, youcould charge it and be paid 60p - then save 90p discharging it again later when prices get back to normal. That's a gain of £1.50, so you'd need to do it 800 times to pay for the battery.
If this sort of thing was happening every day, it would be worth doing (the battery would pay for itself in a little over two years). But it's only happening a handful of times a year, so your payback period becomes a century or two. It's not worth spending the UK's money on equipment that is used so infrequently.

Granted, there are large-scale energy storage sites in the UK (the Dinorwig pumped hydro-electric plant being a stand-out example) and I'm sure they will be fully charged today by their operators. But there's only so much capacity they have, and they're big enough that National Grid will already have them factored into their equations.

To illustrate the scale, Dinorwig can store 9.1GWh, that's around 1.5% of what the UK uses in a day.  

mmmmikey

scobie said:

mmmmikey said:

Agile is working better for me so far. 

It's bizarre to think that I could put a fan heater in the same room as my air conditioner tomorrow and be paid to turn them both on and let them fight with each other!

Am I the only one who worries about the morality of this?  I too am proactively thinking of ways to use power today and it seems wrong somehow.  

I’ve seen FB posts by agile users saying they will burn electric oil heaters all day with the windows open. I’ve seen people offering to do their neighbours tumble drying.  I’ve even seen EV drivers ask if they can charge their cars at neighbours places for free as both will benefit. 

Does this seem right?

it’s seems strange that between them the power generators and retailers can’t work out a way to store the power to smooth out the benefits of lower wholesale prices and demand, rather than creating this weird state of paying me 20p kWh to waste energy. 

No, you're not the only one and no it doesn't seem right to me either. The idea of "wasting" energy just feels wrong and I can't say that I'm comfortable with it. To be pragmatic, though, I can see that once the situation has arisen where more electricity is being generated than is needed "they" have to do something with it even if it means paying people to take it off their hands. So although it feels just plain wrong to me my pragmatic side has taken over and I am doing my bit to relieve "them" of the problem. I guess to be realistic the situation will occur from time to time where the forecasts are wrong and we end up with too much electricity - better that than the other way round where we have power cuts, I guess?

Qyburn

It's likely to happen more and more in the short to medium term as more wind comes online. 15 years or so it was reckoned that we could accomodate 15-18% of wind before the variability became a problem. Since then I think CCGT has been found more effective in handling the variable "gap" but we're reaching its limits as well as feeling the effects of reliance on gas. 

mmmmikey

Qyburn said:

It's likely to happen more and more in the short to medium term as more wind comes online. 15 years or so it was reckoned that we could accomodate 15-18% of wind before the variability became a problem. Since then I think CCGT has been found more effective in handling the variable "gap" but we're reaching its limits as well as feeling the effects of reliance on gas. 

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I got over my inhibitions and did my civic duty this afternoon and managed to use about 17kWh in the 14:00 to 15:00 period, just need to decide what to spend my ill gotten gains on In the battle between the aircon and fan heater, the aircon won easily, keeping the temperature down despite using half the energy.

Chrysalis

I have the same opinion, the pricing adjustment is to encourage load shifting, but if people then deliberately run devices they normally wouldnt run at all just to make money out of it does feel wrong.  If the practice became widespread enough it would even potentially lead to the cancellation of negative pricing if seen as abusive, however some people were doing this type of stuff on the recent scheme ran last year ran by the national grid, and the people running that scheme seemed to have no issue with it, the formula they used even invited abuse.

QrizB

Chrysalis said:

If the practice became widespread enough it would even potentially lead to the cancellation of negative pricing

Increasing demand sufficiently that prices return positive is the idea. It isn't an undesirable side effect, it's the whole point of it.

Although I very much doubt there are enough Agile customers to significantly influence the wholesale price of electricity.

Chrysalis said:

... some people were doing this type of stuff on the recent scheme ran last year ran by the national grid, and the people running that scheme seemed to have no issue with it, the formula they used even invited abuse.

I think they've proposed changes to the formula (removing or reducing the in-day adjustment) for any future events, to reduce the possibility of gaming the system.

[Deleted User]

For those who would like to see how much they would have paid on Agile (without load shifting) this tool might be of interest:

https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard

scobie

I’m glad I’m not alone. I’ve been sickened to see the FB posts gloating about how they kept their oven and tumble dryers on unnecessarily for hours. One idiot boasted he had increased his daily consumption from 4kw to over 50 and how this earned him around the price of a pint. Nice one fella. 

Meanwhile tens of thousands of people - including the vulnerable and elderly - remain in fuel poverty worried to death about how to pay for the fuel they are desperately trying to save. 

Sorry - this ain’t ever going to sit comfortably with me. 

CSI_Yorkshire

scobie said:

I’m glad I’m not alone. I’ve been sickened to see the FB posts gloating about how they kept their oven and tumble dryers on unnecessarily for hours. One idiot boasted he had increased his daily consumption from 4kw to over 50 and how this earned him around the price of a pint. Nice one fella. 

Meanwhile tens of thousands of people - including the vulnerable and elderly - remain in fuel poverty worried to death about how to pay for the fuel they are desperately trying to save. 

Sorry - this ain’t ever going to sit comfortably with me. 

Would you prefer that instead of paying those people 20p/kWh, we paid big generation companies 35p/kWh to turn down or turn off?

Spoonie_Turtle

The point of plunge pricing is to pay people to use it, to take the excess off the grid.  The whole point is to get people to use it.

The saving sessions where people were gaming it to use unnecessarily excessive energy (and I don't just mean load shifting stuff they would have done at a different time) didn't sit right with me.  But this is different.

I do feel for those struggling, and the inherent uncertainty with something like Agile means it's not accessible to most people who are struggling, because they can't take the risk which also means they then can't access the plunge pricing.  It is inherently classist, in that respect, and I don't know what the solution could be to make it more equitable. 

BUT I have no problem with people using the plunge pricing for what it's for - it feels counterintuitive, but the whole concept of needing to save energy is so we don't waste resources.  When there's excess renewable energy that they need to get rid of because there isn't the storage capacity, it's necessary to use it, and it's not like they're burning extra fossil fuels to keep up with the wasteful usage.