Octopus Agile

[ACarneiro]

The UK demand has traditionally been very predictable, and worth remembering that our system is very different to that in the USA. The UK grid covers the whole of the UK, all in one time zone, with demand management systems in place for all big industrial/commercial installations. Demand has, if anything, become less variable here in recent years, as industrial usage has dropped, with the decline in heavy industry, and domestic demand has both dropped and had lower variability, due to both changes in appliance demand and changes in things like TV viewing (here the water supply pumps used to cause a big freq dip during commercial breaks).

The big issue here, unlike the USA, is that we have up to about 40% or so of our generation coming from wind and solar at times, and this can just disappear at times. We don't have a lot of always-on nuclear now, have no oil fired generation at all, and so rely very much on rapid start gas generation to fill in the peaks, together with pumped storage. Battery storage is now coming online at many wind and solar farms, to cover the peaks, too.

You could argue that for the eye-watering sums of money being spent in a smart meter rollout (which will yield uncertain benefits, if I can put it kindly), it would have been better to just invest in better storage systems instead.
I accept that the technology has only really become credible in the last 3 years or so, though.

 

[ACarneiro]

The issue at the moment seems to be that Agile is really the only popular smart meter tariff, and it's being marketed largely on the attractiveness of the plunge pricing periods. The fact that the price often increases a great deal during the peak late afternoon/early evening period doesn't get anywhere near as much publicity as the occasional negative pricing events.

Overall, for us, Agile is still more expensive than E7, although not by that much anymore. There was a clear divide about 6 months ago, with Agile being ~£100/year more expensive than E7, with the increase in the E7 tariffs that differential has dropped to around £30/year.

Be very interesting to see what happens, especially as one or two of the smaller suppliers seem to have realised that they can move into the, perhaps niche, market segment that gives a good deal to those who use more than 50% of their total overnight, like green.energy. For us they are coming out on top for E7 at the moment, as roughly 56% of our total electricity usage is during the E7 period, and we really need that 7 hours cheap rate slot, 4 hours from a tariff like Go doesn't work well.

It’s interesting.
I have two Powerwalls and solar. Although I’m a very heavy electricity user (house alone burns about 25kWh per day, plus electric car), I’m using over 90% of my import at E7 rates.
Even then, I’m struggling to find a single supplier with a rate that is more competitive than what Agile has been.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

Yes indeed, this is my fear. I also don't have a location right next to this which would be ideal for a Powerwall. Part of me would like to go to the trouble of having both a powerwall and the mart meter/FIT meter etc all repositioned outside the house...although practically thats impossible because its a listed building...oh the chaos.
Plus Ideally we would have a solar roof on our garage, but then that would have to tie-in (presumably with a second inverter) to our existing ground-mount (driveway) solar...
Its all so horribly complicated compared to people who have a conventional non-listed house with a big roof and the electricity meter somewhere sensible

The other issue might be finding a compliant location for a new consumer unit, as any new installation should really comply with the current regs, and there's now an accessibility requirement for CUs (to allow for easy six monthly testing, access in case of a fault, etc). It's often hard to find somewhere to reposition a CU, especially in older houses where they were often fitted in out-of-the-way locations, typically up near ceiling height in many cases (makes running cables into a floor void easy for the electrician).

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

The UK demand has traditionally been very predictable, and worth remembering that our system is very different to that in the USA. The UK grid covers the whole of the UK, all in one time zone, with demand management systems in place for all big industrial/commercial installations. Demand has, if anything, become less variable here in recent years, as industrial usage has dropped, with the decline in heavy industry, and domestic demand has both dropped and had lower variability, due to both changes in appliance demand and changes in things like TV viewing (here the water supply pumps used to cause a big freq dip during commercial breaks).

The big issue here, unlike the USA, is that we have up to about 40% or so of our generation coming from wind and solar at times, and this can just disappear at times. We don't have a lot of always-on nuclear now, have no oil fired generation at all, and so rely very much on rapid start gas generation to fill in the peaks, together with pumped storage. Battery storage is now coming online at many wind and solar farms, to cover the peaks, too.

(Note that I am an ex-pat Briton and I am aware of the how the UK grid works, and what a morass US electricity is.)

Demand has never been completely predictable. The grid has _some_ flexibility but has to be able to react to demand, hence the need for fast-reacting peaker plants.

The changes aren't just about renewables. It's also about technology becoming available at reasonable cost to provide near real-time granular data. It's also about households having a sudden increase in maximum load and demand from PEVs, and having the ability to control that demand.

Far from being a smart meter sales company, Octopus has moved to take advantage of a new, growing market.

Do nothing and have flat pricing and PEVs will add to peak demand and increase the cost of electricity, because people will have no incentive not to plug in and charge immediately. Be proactive and they turn into a valuable resource.

I remember some years ago watching a video where Robert Llewellyn visited the National Grid control center and the National Grid employee talked about the potential for PEVs to fill in the bathtub of nighttime's reduced demand. That's Go. What's changed with the increased shift to renewables is that PEV charging will follow production instead of other demand. That's Agile.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

You could argue that for the eye-watering sums of money being spent in a smart meter rollout (which will yield uncertain benefits, if I can put it kindly), it would have been better to just invest in better storage systems instead.
I accept that the technology has only really become credible in the last 3 years or so, though.

I agree. The thing that's driving all the battery storage systems that are springing up on pretty much every big solar and wind farm now, is just the profit that can be made from not selling electricity when the price is low (the plunge pricing periods) and storing it, and then selling that stored energy when the prices rise. With the massive peak to trough wholesale price ratio we have at the moment, caused almost entirely by variations in renewable energy generation, companies can make a lot of money from short term storage. Co-locating that storage at existing solar and wind farms means there's very little additional infrastructure cost, as the grid connections are already in place.

The daft thing about this is that the incentive to build battery storage will disappear once there is a lot of it in place, as it will reduce the variability in price that is the only thing driving it, commercially. We could end up in a position in a few years time when funding the replacement of battery storage systems becomes a problem, as the replacements may not generate enough revenue to be worth fitting. One of the snags with allowing energy generation to operate as a free market, I guess.

 

[ACarneiro]

By the time the currently deployed battery storage systems come to the end of their lives (I would imagine a decade or so?), technology will have evolved. Their replacements will hopefully be much cheaper and durable and if they are made mandatory (at a much smaller scale) in new builds, that alone will contribute massively to smooth out the peaks.
I’m not holding my breath for the latter option, mind you.

 

[Glan gluaisne]

(Note that I am an ex-pat Briton and I am aware of the how the UK grid works, and what a morass US electricity is.)

Demand has never been completely predictable. The grid has _some_ flexibility but has to be able to react to demand, hence the need for fast-reacting peaker plants.

The changes aren't just about renewables. It's also about technology becoming available at reasonable cost to provide near real-time granular data. It's also about households having a sudden increase in maximum load and demand from PEVs, and having the ability to control that demand.

Far from being a smart meter sales company, Octopus has moved to take advantage of a new, growing market.

Do nothing and have flat pricing and PEVs will add to peak demand and increase the cost of electricity, because people will have no incentive not to plug in and charge immediately. Be proactive and they turn into a valuable resource.

I remember some years ago watching a video where Robert Llewellyn visited the National Grid control center and the National Grid employee talked about the potential for PEVs to fill in the bathtub of nighttime's reduced demand. That's Go. What's changed with the increased shift to renewables is that PEV charging will follow production instead of other demand. That's Agile.

Certainly demand still varies, but nowhere near as much as renewable generation varies. Take the situation right now (at the time I'm typing this, 13:25 GMT), for example. 42% of the total UK demand is being met by renewable generation. A few days ago, renewable generation was down around 5% of the total. Unpredicted demand variation doesn't swing over anything like that sort of range.

The big problem UK Grid have been trying to manage has been the significant reduction in spinning reserve over the past decade or two. We have a relatively high proportion of generating plants that cannot modulate quickly, if at all, and we've lost quite a lot of the generating plant that could be kept spinning and synced, with a low output, ready to ramp up reasonably quickly for predicted demand increases. Some of the pricing structures have acted as a disincentive to generating companies to maintain spinning reserve, as have some of the regulatory decisions that have caused the closure of all oil fired generation. We're very much reliant on gas, with a bit of pumped hydro, and some help from the European interconnects, to cover short term peak demand, although, given the speed with with distributed battery storage seems to be being rolled out, and given that battery storage can be made to act like spinning reserve, I suspect things will get easier before long.

The impact of EVs will definitely help, if most EV charging can be done during the low demand period overnight. There's a fair bit of surplus generation capacity at the moment, as overall demand here has been dropping, year on year, for the past ten or more years. Demand last year only used about 70% of our installed capacity, for example, and capacity was down as we had several nuclear generators offline for maintenance (still have at the moment).

 

[Glan gluaisne]

By the time the currently deployed battery storage systems come to the end of their lives (I would imagine a decade or so?), technology will have evolved. Their replacements will hopefully be much cheaper and durable and if they are made mandatory (at a much smaller scale) in new builds, that alone will contribute massively to smooth out the peaks.
I’m not holding my breath for the latter option, mind you.

Given the pace of development in big battery storage systems, I think you're probably right. The success of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, in recovering it's capital investment cost within a year, certainly opened the eyes of a lot of people to the potential for quick to install battery storage systems. Although companies like LG had been in this sector for a while, it pretty much took Elon Musk and his "if we don't have it running in a year, we'll give it to you for free" approach to get some people to sit up and take notice.

As for home battery storage, the main problem is that the costs associated with the installation, rather than the costs associated solely with the system, are too high. If battery prices were to drop by 50%, it wouldn't make anything like that sort of difference to the installed price of a small system. Having said that, we're not far off the point where installing a battery system at home may break even over the life of the system. I've been keeping track of prices, and right now if I self-install a ~10 kWh system, then it's going to come close to covering the cost over ten years. If new homes had the infrastructure built in for battery storage, then, with the economy of scale that comes from doing this on a large housing development, it seems probable that it might be cost effective before long.

The big snag is the same as the one when I built this house. I had it valued on completion, really just out of curiosity, and the valuer reduced the valuation by 5%, as it was, in his words, an "eco house". His view was that house buyers were not interested in energy saving, and some would be put off because of things like the heat recovery ventilation, the built-in solar panels that form a large part of the roof covering, triple glazing, unusually thick wall insulation and the heat pump for heating/cooling. If that's the mentality of a lot of house buyers, then I can imagine that their reaction to a battery storage system might well be that it adds no value to the house.

 

[ACarneiro]

His view was that house buyers were not interested in energy saving, and some would be put off because of things like the heat recovery ventilation, the built-in solar panels that form a large part of the roof covering, triple glazing, unusually thick wall insulation and the heat pump for heating/cooling.

This has genuinely astounded me. You’d think that energy efficiency, lower running costs and superior materials would add value to the house? Even if you’re not “ecologically minded”?

 

[Glan gluaisne]

This has genuinely astounded me. You’d think that energy efficiency, lower running costs and superior materials would add value to the house? Even if you’re not “ecologically minded”?

It astounded me, too. It wasn't just a one-off, though, as a chap in the village ended up removing his solar panel system when he sold his house, as the estate agent told him that it would detract from the desirability and value of the house if he tried to sell the house with it still on the roof.

 

[Godsense]

Well, I’ve registered my interest for a smart meter about 2 months.
Haven’t heard a peep so far...

I must admit to being fairly unimpressed by Octopus. They’re far from being the cheapest, they’re backend tech is failing regularly and the customer support is lovely but not particularly efficient...

Drop them an email, was in similar situation to you.
Got an appointment through within a few days. There was a covid backlog but hopefully they got through some of that now

 

[ACarneiro]

Drop them an email, was in similar situation to you.
Got an appointment through within a few days. There was a covid backlog but hopefully they got through some of that now

I did drop an email and just got a link to a page saying there’s a backlog.
Very helpful...

 

[m3gt2]

I did drop an email and just got a link to a page saying there’s a backlog.
Very helpful...

Try Facebook, took a day or so to get back but the response was as good as it could be for me.

 

[rincewind]

Drop them an email, was in similar situation to you.
Got an appointment through within a few days. There was a covid backlog but hopefully they got through some of that now

I dropped them an email saying that if they couldn't move forward with the smart meter then I'd find a supplier who could. I had a polite reply within a day, linking to an appointment booking system. Job done and meters installed in a week.

 

[ACarneiro]

Try Facebook, took a day or so to get back but the response was as good as it could be for me.

Facebook is the work of Satan himself and I don't have a profile

 

[Godsense]

I did drop an email and just got a link to a page saying there’s a backlog.
Very helpful...

That isn't very good at all!

 

[Godsense]

Looking nice from 0200 if you need a top up or wait till the weekend, hmmm!

 

[Medved_77]

Looking nice from 0200 if you need a top up or wait till the weekend, hmmm!

View attachment 603495

Saturday Morning is hovering around 5p according to the Octopus Watch predictions. It doesn't go as far as Sunday morning unfortunately.

 

[Drew57]

Using Watch app I've set a 4hr Zappi charge tonight from 1am - will average 1.35p/kWh

 

[ACarneiro]

I know it’s a bit wishful thinking but I wish there was Tesla (car and Powerwall) integration with Agile...