Octopus / Solar Newbie

anonymousmackem

Hi I’m trying to help my elderly uncle by ensuring he’s on a decent energy tariff. I’m an Octopus customer & have made significant savings from their Tracker tariff. I’m hoping my uncle can also benefit financially from being an Octopus customer. Trouble is he has solar panels with a large storage battery & I have zero knowledge of how solar tariffs work. His solar system was fitted by eon many years ago and he’s remained with eon ever since. Periodically he gets FIT rebates which I believe are based on the excess electricity that’s sold back to the grid. My main question is whether my uncle is likely to be on a legacy FIT that pays a decent rate. I’m sure I remember historical news reports that newer solar tariffs had poorer FIT rates. I’m concerned that if my uncle moves to Octopus he may lose the benefit of his legacy FIT rates. I’ve also read that FITs are being phased out. Now I’m totally confused! I rang Octopus to see if they could help put things in layman’s terms but the agent just signposted me to their website. Any guidance would be much appreciated. BTW my uncle doesn’t have an EV so all the electricity that’s stored in his battery is used for the home or fed back to the grid. I’m thinking therefore that the Octopus Agile tariff may be the best tariff provided of course he wouldn’t lose out by surrendering his legacy eon tariff, if that’s indeed relevant. 

QrizB

anonymousmackem said:

His solar system was fitted by eon many years ago and he’s remained with eon ever since. Periodically he gets FIT rebates which I believe are based on the excess electricity that’s sold back to the grid. My main question is whether my uncle is likely to be on a legacy FIT that pays a decent rate. I’m sure I remember historical news reports that newer solar tariffs had poorer FIT rates.

The FIT payments come in two parts:

• Generation payments, where he's paid for every kWh generated regardless of whether he uses it or exports it.
• Export payments, paid for every kWh he exports. (If not metered, it's deemed that 50% is exported.)
  

The payments vary depending on when his FIT started. For old FITs, the export payment is 5.07p/kWh, for newer ones it's 7.14p/kWh.

The full table is here:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/feed-tariff-fit-tariff-table-1-april-2024

FITs run for either 25 or 20 years. New registrations stopped some years ago but existing ones will continue to the end of their life.

anonymousmackem said:

I’m concerned that if my uncle moves to Octopus he may lose the benefit of his legacy FIT rates.

Your FIT supplier is entirely separate from your regular electricity supplier. My FIT was originally with nPower (now EON Next) but in the past 13 years I've had half-a-dozen differnet electricity suppliers, all while leaving my FIT alone.

anonymousmackem said:

BTW my uncle doesn’t have an EV so all the electricity that’s stored in his battery is used for the home or fed back to the grid. I’m thinking therefore that the Octopus Agile tariff may be the best tariff provided of course he wouldn’t lose out by surrendering his legacy eon tariff, if that’s indeed relevant. 

Right at the moment, I'd say that Agile is a terrible tariff (and I'm sure the Agile fans won't mind me saying that). Tracker isn't great, either. If you want to move him to Octopus, look at their other tariffs for now and maybe think about Agile or Tracker once the winter's over.

zxzxzx

Agile has not been good for a couple of weeks, but is and would be great for your uncle IF he is prepared to put quite a bit of effort into making it work as it is not fire and forget. 

Have a look at Flux tariff for a simple solution.

anonymousmackem

thank you both for taking the time to reply. I feel much better informed. My uncle has just turned 80 so a simple tariff would definitely be best. I will check out the Octopus Flux 🙏 

Reed_Richards

If your uncle receives FiT payments he probably gets paid for what he generates, no matter how much he uses himself.  If he has a smart meter he could switch to being paid for metered export and I think Eon Next pay 16.5p per kWh to their customers, a better rate than Octopus.  I'm not sure if this applies to Eon as well (I don't understand the distinction between Eon and Eon Next).