Economy 10 Tariff

JSHarris

I know you LOVE to argue minutiae, @QrizB , but just the fact that UW can hold their off-peak price down for the first quarter of 2024 whilst EDF (and several others) hiked theirs a lot shows that there is not an underlying wholesale pricing issue driving this behaviour.   If there was then suppliers offering fairer off-peak prices would be losing money, and frankly I don't believe for one moment that any of them willingly try to do that.

The same happened last year, and I switched supplier then to dodge it (as I've just done again). It's a PITA switching suppliers when I am near-100% sure that all that's going on is gamesmanship. 

Swipe

JSHarris said:

The same happened last year, and I switched supplier then to dodge it (as I've just done again). It's a PITA switching suppliers when I am near-100% sure that all that's going on is gamesmanship. 

Out of interest, who did you switch to?

mmmmikey

JSHarris said:

I know you LOVE to argue minutiae, @QrizB , but just the fact that UW can hold their off-peak price down for the first quarter of 2024 whilst EDF (and several others) hiked theirs a lot shows that there is not an underlying wholesale pricing issue driving this behaviour.   If there was then suppliers offering fairer off-peak prices would be losing money, and frankly I don't believe for one moment that any of them willingly try to do that.

The same happened last year, and I switched supplier then to dodge it (as I've just done again). It's a PITA switching suppliers when I am near-100% sure that all that's going on is gamesmanship. 

No, it doesn't show that. You are assuming that UW are pricing purely on the basis of wholesale market rates which is not necessarily the case. UW typically bundle their energy sales with other products, for example Broadband, and that gives them the opportunity to sell one product at a loss in order to make greater profits on another. All kinds of marketing initiatives distort pricing.

Also worth noting that although EDF night time pricing has gone up, the Ofgem price cap means the day time pricing must have gone down for customers on SVR. So for every £1 extra one customer pays extra for night time  electricity, another customer will pay £1 less for day time electricity (factoring out any more general increase or decrease).

Keep in mind too, the Government EPG massively distorted E7 pricing last year to the point where some night time rates would actually have gone negative if the Government contribution had been applied as a straight p/kWh on both day and night rates. This clearly would have been a ridiculous and unsustainable anomaly so suppliers like EDF who have traditionally been better for night time users had to make some unusual changes. Comparisons with last winter are therefore largely meaningless.

Finally, if you compare EDF rates with other more typical suppliers (i.e. where energy is not bundled with other products) you'll see that they have tended to move in line with those suppliers. So the suggestion that multiple suppliers have all hiked prices doesn't really hold - i.e if the gap has changed they must be varying prices by different amounts. Your argument doesn't seem to hold water to me.

Legacy TOU tariffs (such as E7 and E10) that rely on bespoke metering systems severely restrict consumer ability to swap and change tariffs as the market develops. There are major changes to the energy market afoot. Quite aside from global disruption to gas markets, the amount of wind power is increasing on the supply side, and on the demand side EVs and heat pumps will have an increasing effect. So all things considered, the legacy tariffs are likely to change and consumers without smart meters stuck on legacy tariffs are likely to suffer. Not because of supplier behaviour but simply because the market is changing.

JSHarris

FWIW @mmmmikey , it's not just UW.  Sainsbury's and  E.On, to name just two others, didn't massively hike their off-peak prices come 1st January.  EDF went from being close to the cheapest to close to the most expensive overnight on 31st December, as did several others that also reduced their peak rates at this time.

Some of us have zero choice when it comes to tariffs.  For me it's E7 or nothing - there are no other tariffs available to me that make any sense.

QrizB

WiseDad said:

Our tariff is Superdeal (which OVO inherited from SSE).

Thanks. From OVO's site:

Superdeal

Like Flexiheat, Superdeal is exclusive to customers in certain parts of southern England. It also has one meter with three rates:

• One rate records all the electricity you use during the day

• Another records all of the electricity you use during the night period

• The third measures all the electricity you use during the seven hours of cheaper-rate electricity for stored heat and hot water

Superdeal works by storing up heat and hot water using the lowest possible rate of electricity. It works best with storage heating, so it isn't usually suitable for homes with other forms of heating.

When are the cheaper, off-peak times for Superdeal?

You get seven hours at the cheapest rate for your stored heat and hot water. In the colder months, one to two of those hours may be during the day for top-ups. You can also take advantage of the cheaper electricity rate for your appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. They're charged at the cheaper rate everyday between midnight and 7.00am.

So you currently get seven hours a day (solely for heat appliances) on your "stored heat" rate, and those same seven hours a day are charged at a different rate for everything else.

That's quite similar to Economy 7, albeit with the possibility of OVO giving you one or two of your seven hours during the daytime.

Do you have a radio teleswitch?

WiseDad said:

Many of our storage heaters are well insulated (with a fan to extract additional heat), albeit now 25 years old, they were the best that were available at the time and the system was designed with the assistance of SSE to work with the Superdeal tariff.

And they might very well work with Economy 7. Do you have a specifi reason to think that they won't?

WiseDad said:

Our off-peak rate is now 22.64p/kWh (+ VAT) and our heating rate 24.47p/kWh (+ VAT).  This is the first time ever that the heating rate has been higher than the off-peak rate which seems completely illogical.

Is your corresponding peak tariff 31.29p/kWh?

For comparison, OVO's conventional E7 tariff in Southern region (ex-SSE) has an 18.32p/kWh night rate. That's somewhat cheaper than either of your current off-peak rates. Full details below.

Have you thought of just switching to E7? The 4p/6p that you save on 90% of your electricity would be more than enough of a saving to make up for the 2p extra on the peak rate.

mmmmikey

JSHarris said:

FWIW @mmmmikey , it's not just UW.  Sainsbury's and  E.On, to name just two others, didn't massively hike their off-peak prices come 1st January.  EDF went from being close to the cheapest to close to the most expensive overnight on 31st December, as did several others that also reduced their peak rates at this time.

Some of us have zero choice when it comes to tariffs.  For me it's E7 or nothing - there are no other tariffs available to me that make any sense.

Sure, I appreciate the price increase are a bit of a nightmare, but not significantly different for E7 customers than other customers over the last couple of years overall. If anything, E7 customers have done fairly well over the last couple of years because their price increases have come later.

I think the thing that one of the biggest things that happened here but that you haven't mentioned is that E7 customers who use most of their electricity overnight, and particularly those with EDF, actually saw their prices go down significantly last winter. For example. I paid 6p/kWh over night from Jan to Mar 2023 compared with 13p/kWh from Jul to Sep 2022 - i.e. less than half. Some customers in the Eastern region paid even less than that. Over this period, most electricity and gas customers saw their unit rates double. By the time you took the various allowances into account, I actually didn't pay anything for my electricity last winter, not even standing charges. This anomoly happened because of the way the Government EPG scheme and other assistance was structured. It was absolutely inevitable that prices would go up massively at some stage, but only because of a combination of them going down when other prices were going up and then taking the hit of losing the "discount" and getting the increase at the same time.

That situation has now corrected itself and E7 customers are seing the same kind of increase that other energy users have, but in one great big eye-watering swoop after some delay. In other words, the "cost of living crisis" or whatever you want to call it has finally caught up with them. So although it seems absolutely horrendous now, E7 users have actually done pretty well overall because of the working of the EPG mechanism. There's no great conspiracy of energy suppliers taking the mickey out of customers - the market is correcting itself. I'm afraid the harsh reality is that you're seeing the same swingeing increases that most other folks have already seen and had to adjust to.

Folks with gas central heating systems are "conditioned" to expect annual boiler services and to need a replacement boiler every 10 to 15 years and tend to plan for these maintenance and replacement costs. On the other hand, it's not uncommon for folks to be using 30 year old storage heaters, still functional but based on old technology, so probably fair game to think in terms of needing to upgrade or replace them. But because they've never had to, many people haven't budgeted for this or simply can't afford to and this compunds the issue. On the upside, there are generous grants available (or at least there were until very recently, I'm not sure this is still the case) for the less well off customers.

So bottom line is I'm afraid it's just the way it is. There has been a huge energy market shock and prices have risen dramatically. And this has happened at the same time as other significant changes (such as more wind energy, EVs, heat pumps and so on). There isn't really much more to it than that.

JSHarris

My point is that some suppliers (and EDF is one) stand out because they increase their off-peak tariff, whilst reducing their peak rate tariff (i.e. they are cross-subsiding their mostly peak rate and standard rate customers) by increasing their off-peak prices to way above what they are paying for off-peak electricity, and doing it during the period when they know that all customers with storage heating will be using more off-peak electricity.

If the off-peak period wholesale prices had gone up by roughly the same amount then I'd not have the slightest problem with this approach, but the fact is they haven't, if anything wholesale prices so far have been lower than they were.

I find it hard to see any reason other than trying to over-charge off-peak users in order to subsidise others, or more likely make their standard rates look more competitive.  If anyone gets a quote using their standard algorithm for the split of peak to off-peak (OK, really the Ofcom algorithm) then their tariff looks competitive, which belies the fact that for those of us stuck having to use E7 are really paying over the odds in order to allow them to reduce the day time and standard rate prices.

It doesn't particularly bother me, other than the nuisance factor of having to switch suppliers again, as at least UW have maintained a realistic off-peak price, one that is a great deal cheaper than the EDF price and even slightly cheaper than the last quarter 2023 EDF price (although not enough of a difference then for me to bother to switch).

QrizB

JSHarris said:

My point is that some suppliers (and EDF is one) stand out because they increase their off-peak tariff, whilst reducing their peak rate tariff (i.e. they are cross-subsiding their mostly peak rate and standard rate customers) by increasing their off-peak prices to way above what they are paying for off-peak electricity, and doing it during the period when they know that all customers with storage heating will be using more off-peak electricity.

And your point still doesn't stand scrutiny. EDF reduced their off-peak rates considerably last winter, for reasons they haven't divulged but which seem to be related to the government's Energy Price Guarantee.

The E7 cheap rate for winter 2022/23 was cheaper than winter 2021/22 or summer 2022 despite energy prices in general being higher. The October 2022 E7 cheap rate for East Midlands was 6.9p/kWh. In January 2023 it was 7.1p/kWh. The January 2023 PAYG E7 rate for Eastern region was 0.94p/kWh - less than a penny.

EDF have now returned their off-peak prices to "normal".

JSHarris

QrizB said:

JSHarris said:

My point is that some suppliers (and EDF is one) stand out because they increase their off-peak tariff, whilst reducing their peak rate tariff (i.e. they are cross-subsiding their mostly peak rate and standard rate customers) by increasing their off-peak prices to way above what they are paying for off-peak electricity, and doing it during the period when they know that all customers with storage heating will be using more off-peak electricity.

EDF have now returned their off-peak prices to "normal".

Actually they have increased their off-peak rates to almost the highest of any supplier for this region, so very far from "normal" by any stretch of anyone's imagination.  I don't give a damn what they were charging last year, the year before or at any other time, it's not relevant as I wasn't with EDF this time last year (I was with UW as it happens, as I am now).  The facts are that they massively increased their off-peak rate right before the onset of the cold weather period, whereas several other suppliers chose not to.

QrizB

JSHarris said:

QrizB said:

JSHarris said:

My point is that some suppliers (and EDF is one) stand out because they increase their off-peak tariff, whilst reducing their peak rate tariff (i.e. they are cross-subsiding their mostly peak rate and standard rate customers) by increasing their off-peak prices to way above what they are paying for off-peak electricity, and doing it during the period when they know that all customers with storage heating will be using more off-peak electricity.

EDF have now returned their off-peak prices to "normal".

Actually they have increased their off-peak rates to almost the highest of any supplier for this region, so very far from "normal" by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

You don't need imagination, I've checked prices for the past three years and have posted them, with links to the ratecards, here on the first page of this thread.

JSHarris said:

I don't give a damn what they were charging last year, the year before or at any other time, it's not relevant ...

It's relevant to your regular claim that:

JSHarris said:

There's been a clear pattern over the past two winters that very strongly suggests that some suppliers are choosing to disproportionately increase off-peak rates in winter,

A claim which you've yet to evidence.