Very pushy replacement energy meter calls

Netexporter

However, the context would also entail costly changes to the house and thus wipe out any money savings per-se.

Try getting a quote for a heat pump from Octopus. Many people are paying less than the cost of replacing a boiler, once the £7500 government grant has been applied.

I'm getting a heat pump and solar panels free on the ECO4 scheme.

prowla

Netexporter said:

However, the context would also entail costly changes to the house and thus wipe out any money savings per-se.

Try getting a quote for a heat pump from Octopus. Many people are paying less than the cost of replacing a boiler, once the £7500 government grant has been applied.

I'm getting a heat pump and solar panels free on the ECO4 scheme.

It's a nice idea, but I don't have a viable location to put a heat pump.

Add onto that a load of rewiring, shifting or removing water tanks, etc. and the costs just add up.

Netexporter

Add onto that a load of rewiring, shifting or removing water tanks, etc. and the costs just add up.

That's all included. Octopus even remove your gas supply, for free, so that's an instant saving of the gas standing charge.

mmmmikey

prowla said:

Netexporter said:

Well, that's an interesting number, for sure!

I don't have gas (or solar or batteries) but my savings on electricity, on Octopus Agile, are similar. Last month I paid an average of 9.09p/kWh; the highest average I've paid is 19.56p/kWh and that was when the SVT was about 30p/kWh.

I just looked at those numbers and they could potentially help reinforce my aspiration of going all-electric when my ageing gas boiler finally pops its clogs.

However, the context would also entail costly changes to the house and thus wipe out any money savings per-se.

Something to consider if you have aspirations to go all electric? ......

There are a range of TOU tarriffs and it's more complicated than this, but as a general rule, with a TOU tarriff you pay a lot less per kWh compared to SVR overnight and a lot more per kWh during the day. That means that if you combine solar panels with a TOU tarriff, each kWh you generate during the day saves you buying electricity at a higher rate and therefore the payback time is very much quicker. Of course, there are all kinds of things to think about, such as whether you have battery storage, seasonal variations and so on but the key point is that the economics of solar panels can be very different if you combine them with TOU tarriffs. 

Solar panels have fallen in price significantly over the last year or so and the market (at least where I live) has become more competitive. So although a break even of the order of 15 years is roughly what I calculated a couple of years back (I've toyed with the idea of having another system on a different elevation), when I do the sums now based on current prices and combining them with a TOU tariff rather than SVR a break even of maybe 7 or 8 years doesnt seem unreallistic. Lots of caveats about your particular house, future prices and so on but worth checking if you haven't done so recently.

The catch of course is that you need one of those dreaded smart meters that lots of people complain about to make the economics work, so unfortunately you'll have to sell your soul to the evil energy overlords and you'll need to buy a tin foil hat to benefit On the plus side, you won't get any more annoying and pushy phone calls imploring you to have a smart meter fitted.

Incidentally, the payback time on smart meters is phenomonal - it costs nothing and 90% + of the time you start benefitting immediately. Annoying for the small minority who are unlucky enough to have issues, but at least it's a one way bet - there's a small chance you might not gain immediately but other than the inconvenience of having the smart meter fitted (which you'll almost certainly have to do sooner or later anyway) very little to loose.

BarelySentientAI

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

We couldn't move to a complete just-in-time service,as that would leave the country hugeley exposed on the energy front.

On a country scale, that's exactly what we have.

prowla said:

Regardless of usage profiles, the green energy generated does need to be stored , unless the excess whilst the sun is out simply thrown away.

We store almost no electricity.

prowla said:

Presumably the energy suppliers always need to keep a reserve buffer (at least 20%, I would surmise).

Suppliers keep no buffer.

prowla said:

The energy suppliers monitor the reserves that have in stock and buy & sell on that basis; the input amassed from smart meters may have some value in computing analyses after the event, but it wil not drive the buying and selling of energy.

Energy usage is not completely predictable or deterministic.

The improved granularity of data from smart meters is improving the predictability of the demand - which is already predictable to an astonishing level of accuracy (usually within 100MW of the 30000MW demand).

Suppliers don't monitor any sort of reserve in stock, because there is no 'stock' of electricity.

Your general point is decent, although I don't agree with it, but seems to be built on a whole lot of misunderstanding of how the system actually works.

I think your conclusions there serve to make my point, ie. if current predictions are to within 1 in 300, then the result of continued smart meter roll-out is statistically insignificant.

Regarding storage (of electricity), this ref https://www.energy-storage.news/800mwh-of-utility-scale-energy-storage-capacity-added-in-the-uk-during-2022/ asserts that 8x that 100 MWh variability was added to the grid in 2022; presumably it has continued to increase since.

In other words, the system has plenty of storage to cover the discrepancies.

Thus the "I gots to know!" reasoning behind pushy calls for smart meter installations really doesn't hold water.

MW =/= MWh

The last part of the inaccuracy is the most expensive to address, and keeps getting more expensive.

You've also now gone from talking about 'suppliers' to 'the system' - a completely different emphasis and they don't work in anything like the same way.

None of your 'gotcha' arguments are as relevant as you think they are.  Nothing wrong with you having your point of view, but misunderstanding my responses doesn't help you support them.

Okeys - you said there is no stock of electricity and I pointed out there is, enough to cover it for 8 hours a day.

The suppliers are part of a system which delivers energy and bills us for the pleasure; many of the "suppliers" are just brokers and billing operations who don't really deliver the energy at all.

Yes, a MWh is the ability to deliver a MW for an hour; you're right i don't understand your point.

Ok, I'll spell it out.  I know this because I have designed utility scale battery systems and have worked in system balancing, planning, network management and the technical section of trading companies in both the UK and European power markets.

The system operator ensures that demand and supply are exactly balanced at all times.  They can, if required, pay a rather large amount of money for things like those battery systems to use a small part of their capacity to balance second-to-second errors.  No battery system in the country goes from full to empty to cover any sort of mismatch.  Batteries are very good at fast and fine changes, so that's what they do.  They sit somewhere near the middle of their charge capacity and do little bits in and out.  It is not "an emergency stock of energy", it is a generator that can do either positive or negative output and gets paid like one.  Doing this instant balancing is one of the most expensive things the system operator does, and counts for a decent chunk of the transmission fees in the standing charge. (as an example, it cost £8.5 million for the first three days of this week, or £1550 million for winter 2021/22)

Every supplier has to guess, for every half hour of the day, how much electricity its customers use.  If they guess wrong, they either have to buy more from or sell some back to the system operator because (as mentioned) the system is balanced and it doesn't just fill up some surplus storage shed.  The price for this is much higher than the price for just buying power on the market.

If more people have smart meters, then two things are possible.  Either the people can be paid to use more or use less (as that is often cheaper than paying the system operator penalty), or the supplier gets better at guessing and has to do less of this correction (so costs less overall).

Better guessing, or paying customers less than they otherwise pay the system operator, makes bills cheaper.  More smart meters, therefore, both make things cheaper overall, and make things 'extra cheaper' for people who get paid like this - sort of what the smart tariffs do and what the winter saver things were all about.

Qyburn

prowla said:

Okeys - you said there is no stock of electricity and I pointed out there is, enough to cover it for 8 hours a day.

You seem hell bent on ignoring correction of your wildly inaccurate figures and assumptions. But even if you were correct and the UK has 320 times as much storage as you originally stated, it's not 90 seconds or 8 hours per day. It's just 90 seconds (or eight hours). A measure of stored energy, not a rate.

mmmmikey

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

We couldn't move to a complete just-in-time service,as that would leave the country hugeley exposed on the energy front.

On a country scale, that's exactly what we have.

prowla said:

Regardless of usage profiles, the green energy generated does need to be stored , unless the excess whilst the sun is out simply thrown away.

We store almost no electricity.

prowla said:

Presumably the energy suppliers always need to keep a reserve buffer (at least 20%, I would surmise).

Suppliers keep no buffer.

prowla said:

The energy suppliers monitor the reserves that have in stock and buy & sell on that basis; the input amassed from smart meters may have some value in computing analyses after the event, but it wil not drive the buying and selling of energy.

Energy usage is not completely predictable or deterministic.

The improved granularity of data from smart meters is improving the predictability of the demand - which is already predictable to an astonishing level of accuracy (usually within 100MW of the 30000MW demand).

Suppliers don't monitor any sort of reserve in stock, because there is no 'stock' of electricity.

Your general point is decent, although I don't agree with it, but seems to be built on a whole lot of misunderstanding of how the system actually works.

I think your conclusions there serve to make my point, ie. if current predictions are to within 1 in 300, then the result of continued smart meter roll-out is statistically insignificant.

Regarding storage (of electricity), this ref https://www.energy-storage.news/800mwh-of-utility-scale-energy-storage-capacity-added-in-the-uk-during-2022/ asserts that 8x that 100 MWh variability was added to the grid in 2022; presumably it has continued to increase since.

In other words, the system has plenty of storage to cover the discrepancies.

Thus the "I gots to know!" reasoning behind pushy calls for smart meter installations really doesn't hold water.

MW =/= MWh

The last part of the inaccuracy is the most expensive to address, and keeps getting more expensive.

You've also now gone from talking about 'suppliers' to 'the system' - a completely different emphasis and they don't work in anything like the same way.

None of your 'gotcha' arguments are as relevant as you think they are.  Nothing wrong with you having your point of view, but misunderstanding my responses doesn't help you support them.

Okeys - you said there is no stock of electricity and I pointed out there is, enough to cover it for 8 hours a day.

The suppliers are part of a system which delivers energy and bills us for the pleasure; many of the "suppliers" are just brokers and billing operations who don't really deliver the energy at all.

Yes, a MWh is the ability to deliver a MW for an hour; you're right i don't understand your point.

Ok, I'll spell it out.  I know this because I have designed utility scale battery systems and have worked in system balancing, planning, network management and the technical section of trading companies in both the UK and European power markets.

The system operator ensures that demand and supply are exactly balanced at all times.  They can, if required, pay a rather large amount of money for things like those battery systems to use a small part of their capacity to balance second-to-second errors.  No battery system in the country goes from full to empty to cover any sort of mismatch.  Batteries are very good at fast and fine changes, so that's what they do.  They sit somewhere near the middle of their charge capacity and do little bits in and out.  It is not "an emergency stock of energy", it is a generator that can do either positive or negative output and gets paid like one.  Doing this instant balancing is one of the most expensive things the system operator does, and counts for a decent chunk of the transmission fees in the standing charge. (as an example, it cost £8.5 million for the first three days of this week, or £1550 million for winter 2021/22)

Every supplier has to guess, for every half hour of the day, how much electricity its customers use.  If they guess wrong, they either have to buy more from or sell some back to the system operator because (as mentioned) the system is balanced and it doesn't just fill up some surplus storage shed.  The price for this is much higher than the price for just buying power on the market.

If more people have smart meters, then two things are possible.  Either the people can be paid to use more or use less (as that is often cheaper than paying the system operator penalty), or the supplier gets better at guessing and has to do less of this correction (so costs less overall).

Better guessing, or paying customers less than they otherwise pay the system operator, makes bills cheaper.  More smart meters, therefore, both make things cheaper overall, and make things 'extra cheaper' for people who get paid like this - sort of what the smart tariffs do and what the winter saver things were all about.

Many thanks for a really interesting post 👍

TheElectricCow

prowla said:

mmmmikey said:

prowla said:

mmmmikey said:

prowla said:

mmmmikey said:

Marvel1 said:

powerful_Rogue said:

prowla said:

powerful_Rogue said:

I would just double the standing charge and electric/gas rate for those that refuse a smart meter with no genuine reason.

I'm sure something like this will happen in the future, sadly it probably won't be as extreme as i'd like it to be.

Why on earth would you want to do that and what would you define as a "genuine reason"?

Plus, what would the "extreme" you'd like it to be - hanging?

Can't be fitted due to no fault of the occupier (EG: Spacing, no signal etc)

Extreme is what I said - Double standing charge and double unit rate for electric/gas.

As to why? Because the tin foil hat brigade irritate me!

What should my parents get then, when this email came through?!

Your April Power Move update.

Hi (Name)

During April your smart meter failed to send us readings at certain times, so we couldn’t see the full picture of your electricity use.

Unfortunately this means you won’t receive a Power Move credit this month.

Seems a bit tough, but it's clear from the OVO FAQs that if the meter doesn't communicate well enough then you can't participate. If your parents have a working smart meter but can't send out the data because of network issues then there's not much OVO or any other supplier can do about it other than make representation to the responsible party - presumably either the DCC or a comms provider. 

Half of me thinks that people who have cooperated fully with the smart meter rollout but are unable to benefit because of where they live should be offered some kind of compensatory payment or maybe a special discounted tariff. But who would pay for that? It would logically be added to the standing charges but that wouldn't be popular.

So maybe it's just a question of accepting that different places have different benefits and drawbacks. Some places can't get a decent TV signal, some places have busy roads, some places are more expensive than others and some you can't get a working smart meter......

Aye, so when you have companies wanting to force people on to smart meters, but they don't provide any guarantee that they will work.

In other words, the alleged 20-30% saving is just a load ot hot air!

There are also stories of people changing supplier and their smart meters not working.

The saving is actually is about 100% in my case because my smart meter measures both import and export from my solar panels. The combined effect of an increased export tariff and lower import costs has the effect of wiping out my bill altogether. 

Not everyone has solar panels of course, but anyone with a smart meter can access Octopus Agile, for example, and if you are prepared to open your mind and spend a few minutes reading the Octopus Agile thread on this forum you'll see dozens of examples of the kind of savings people are making. If you would prefer to avoid a time of use tariff you could switch to Tracker, and again if you're prepared to open your mind and look  at the Tracker thread you'll see dozens of examples of folks making big savings.

The savings to be made are very real, which is a fact that many contributors to this forum can attest to.

OK - you're a special case in that you have solar panels, which is a completely different ball-game.

Agreed - a 20% to 30% saving as previously quoted is a more realistic figure for those without solar panels. Note that many people are making these kinds of savings with no or minimal changes to their lifestyle / usage pattern, and again I'd refer you to the Agile and Tracker threads for examples. All you need is an open mind and to be one of the 90% plus people with a smart meter to benefit. NB if the problem with your smart meter is that the In House Display doesn't work (which accounts for a big slice of the 10% of so-called faulty meters) then you can still benefit from these savings.

If you're posting on a money saving forum saying that you don't think that kind of saving off your energy bills is worth keeping an open mind about and investigating properly, then you're probably posting in the wrong place....

Well, if you're espousing solar panels as a saving, then you're working towards a break-even of ~15 years, so it's more of a lifestyle choice than a real Money Saving scheme.

But, back to smart meters...

Me, I've not seen the case for having a smart meter fitted to date; I'm only on my 2nd Octopus bill and will take stock at some point; I always submit monthly readings.

My last month's energy bill was £148.14, comprising:

Electricity £64.76:

• Energy Used: 175.0 kWh @ 27.42p/kWh = £47.98
• Standing Charge: 30 days @ 45.67p/day = £13.70

Gas £83.38:

• Energy Used*: 999.6 kWh @ 7.16p/kWh = £71.56
• Standing Charge: 30 days @ 26.16p/day = £7.85
• (I'm just winding it back to my summertime setting of 1 hour in the morning and 1 in the evening for hot water on-tap.)
  

It's be interesting to see what the huge savings are that I might reap from having a smart meter fitted.

(Incidentally, when you continually say that people have closed minds it changes the perspective from helpful to accusatory and actually detracts from some of your reasoned arguments.)

Can’t speak for anyone except myself, but my Octopus Agile (smart ToU) bill for April was £32.36 for 248.9kWh. 

Energy used: 248.9kWh @ 7.4p/kWh average for the month = £18.41
Standing Charge: 31 days @ 40.01p/day = £12.40

No solar or battery, just a standard one person all electric household. 

So just looking at electric energy costs alone, I seem to have used around 40% more than yourself, although your cost for the month was still 160% higher than mine.

Make of that what you will, I’m not here to convince you one way or the other, just thought I’d throw a bit extra real world data into the discussion.

Incidentally, if you happen to have an immersion heater and a tariff such as Agile you could reduce the gas bill too by taking advantage of the periods when electric is cheaper than gas, all with the added efficiency benefits of direct electric heat compared to using even the very best gas boilers (which further reduces total kWh usage overall).

prowla

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

BarelySentientAI said:

prowla said:

We couldn't move to a complete just-in-time service,as that would leave the country hugeley exposed on the energy front.

On a country scale, that's exactly what we have.

prowla said:

Regardless of usage profiles, the green energy generated does need to be stored , unless the excess whilst the sun is out simply thrown away.

We store almost no electricity.

prowla said:

Presumably the energy suppliers always need to keep a reserve buffer (at least 20%, I would surmise).

Suppliers keep no buffer.

prowla said:

The energy suppliers monitor the reserves that have in stock and buy & sell on that basis; the input amassed from smart meters may have some value in computing analyses after the event, but it wil not drive the buying and selling of energy.

Energy usage is not completely predictable or deterministic.

The improved granularity of data from smart meters is improving the predictability of the demand - which is already predictable to an astonishing level of accuracy (usually within 100MW of the 30000MW demand).

Suppliers don't monitor any sort of reserve in stock, because there is no 'stock' of electricity.

Your general point is decent, although I don't agree with it, but seems to be built on a whole lot of misunderstanding of how the system actually works.

I think your conclusions there serve to make my point, ie. if current predictions are to within 1 in 300, then the result of continued smart meter roll-out is statistically insignificant.

Regarding storage (of electricity), this ref https://www.energy-storage.news/800mwh-of-utility-scale-energy-storage-capacity-added-in-the-uk-during-2022/ asserts that 8x that 100 MWh variability was added to the grid in 2022; presumably it has continued to increase since.

In other words, the system has plenty of storage to cover the discrepancies.

Thus the "I gots to know!" reasoning behind pushy calls for smart meter installations really doesn't hold water.

MW =/= MWh

The last part of the inaccuracy is the most expensive to address, and keeps getting more expensive.

You've also now gone from talking about 'suppliers' to 'the system' - a completely different emphasis and they don't work in anything like the same way.

None of your 'gotcha' arguments are as relevant as you think they are.  Nothing wrong with you having your point of view, but misunderstanding my responses doesn't help you support them.

Okeys - you said there is no stock of electricity and I pointed out there is, enough to cover it for 8 hours a day.

The suppliers are part of a system which delivers energy and bills us for the pleasure; many of the "suppliers" are just brokers and billing operations who don't really deliver the energy at all.

Yes, a MWh is the ability to deliver a MW for an hour; you're right i don't understand your point.

Ok, I'll spell it out.  I know this because I have designed utility scale battery systems and have worked in system balancing, planning, network management and the technical section of trading companies in both the UK and European power markets.

The system operator ensures that demand and supply are exactly balanced at all times.  They can, if required, pay a rather large amount of money for things like those battery systems to use a small part of their capacity to balance second-to-second errors.  No battery system in the country goes from full to empty to cover any sort of mismatch.  Batteries are very good at fast and fine changes, so that's what they do.  They sit somewhere near the middle of their charge capacity and do little bits in and out.  It is not "an emergency stock of energy", it is a generator that can do either positive or negative output and gets paid like one.  Doing this instant balancing is one of the most expensive things the system operator does, and counts for a decent chunk of the transmission fees in the standing charge. (as an example, it cost £8.5 million for the first three days of this week, or £1550 million for winter 2021/22)

Every supplier has to guess, for every half hour of the day, how much electricity its customers use.  If they guess wrong, they either have to buy more from or sell some back to the system operator because (as mentioned) the system is balanced and it doesn't just fill up some surplus storage shed.  The price for this is much higher than the price for just buying power on the market.

If more people have smart meters, then two things are possible.  Either the people can be paid to use more or use less (as that is often cheaper than paying the system operator penalty), or the supplier gets better at guessing and has to do less of this correction (so costs less overall).

Better guessing, or paying customers less than they otherwise pay the system operator, makes bills cheaper.  More smart meters, therefore, both make things cheaper overall, and make things 'extra cheaper' for people who get paid like this - sort of what the smart tariffs do and what the winter saver things were all about.

Thanks - I knew you had something to say!

prowla

Qyburn said:

prowla said:

Okeys - you said there is no stock of electricity and I pointed out there is, enough to cover it for 8 hours a day.

You seem hell bent on ignoring correction of your wildly inaccurate figures and assumptions. But even if you were correct and the UK has 320 times as much storage as you originally stated, it's not 90 seconds or 8 hours per day. It's just 90 seconds (or eight hours). A measure of stored energy, not a rate.

Apologies - I mised your reply, but since you seem hell bent on repeating it, can you explain where your 90 seconds and 320x numbers come from?

The statement I quoted was that the demand was "already predictable to an astonishing level of accuracy (usually within 100MW of the 30000MW demand".

To spell that out for you, the system has a predictable demand of 30000MW with a discrepancy of 100MW.

The context of this thread is that people are being pressured to take on smart meters and the assertion has been made that they are needed for accurate predictions, but those figures show that is not the case.

If the statement that the 30000MW is accurately predictable and the variance is only 100MW then only that 100MW is relevant to the continued roll-out of smart meters.

The assertion was also made that the smart meters were required to make the demand more predictable, but I said the system has plenty of storage to cover those discrepancies, ie. 100MWh for 8 hours (which can be topped up at non-peak prices.

Qyburn said:

prowla said:

I responded that I'm on a green tariff;  

There's no such thing, as you'd realise if you thought for  second. When someone signs up with  "green" supplier there's no increase in the amount of green energy being produced.

So, you are saying that my energy supplier(s) have been lying to me and I am not on a green tariff?

That's interesting.

I won't be responding to you any more in this thread, as I find your aggressive attitude distasteful and will leave you to find someone else to vent at..