Octopus Energy, including Intelligent and go

[Mrklaw]

Did people game the system? - yes (we saw it here even)
Did people make more money than actually reflected the savings they made - yes
Was the system stupid and made it easy to do so - yes

All of this is interesting.

Did the national grid achieve savings in demand in the requested windows to reduce demand and reduce need to bring on additional expensive/CO2 heavy generation?

If yes then the other questions are things to improve later but not that relevant as the goal was demand reduction

 

[Pink Duck]

From the utilisation report data it does seem it was largely successful at delivering the reduction in demand at the requested peak times.

The £4/kWh live session was the outlier, as it became clear the in-day adjustment period meant customers were paid to use more energy.

 

[Skie]

Shift usage, not use more.

Sure, some people will have extracted the urine by essentially wasting energy, but for me it was enough to concentrate a few days worth of high usage (charging, dishwasher, washing machine, tumbler, 1 off oven cleaning, having dinner earlier etc.) into that window. It led to me using less energy during other times, including peak times.

The rules as written do have a perverse incentive and one that was likely unintentional (but also so obvious I have doubts), but it’s actually shown what people can do with an incentive. Hopefully the future iteration of the system will use that to encourage people to shift high usage, in the same manner, to a time more beneficial to the grid.

 

[Pink Duck]

Did anyone receive an email confirming their 1,000 points for being in top 20% of savers from 15th March session? Or had those bonus points appear in account?

 

[NewbieT]

NG knew of the issue before starting the scheme and accepted the risk. I.e. it wasn’t unintentional.

Q: Could consumers moving demand in anticipation of an event influence the in-day baseline readjustment?
A: We acknowledge that this is a risk. This is another one of the factors for the DFS being an enhanced action rather than an everyday action. We hope that the use of an industry agreed baseline methodology with the agreed sample size will be sufficient to avoid such behaviour.

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/267731/download

 

[Skie]

Did anyone receive an email confirming their 1,000 points for being in top 20% of savers from 15th March session? Or had those bonus points appear in account?

No email, but have had 1,128 bonus points applied on the 31st

 

[Pink Duck]

Saved 1.41 kWh from the 23rd session then? I had bonus points matching the kWh in GBP ×800 to bonus points, without any explanation (yet).

Perhaps they changed their mind and that became the top 20% saver reward overall, not just for the 15th.

 

[phil4]

Did anyone receive an email confirming their 1,000 points for being in top 20% of savers from 15th March session? Or had those bonus points appear in account?

No email, about being in top 20%, but did get 7616 bonus points deposited on 31st March.

 

[Pink Duck]

It’s good to know it’s not just me then. I surmise that they thought it a bit unfair to judge the top 20% of savers from the one with late notice, so may have switched internally to rewarding the top 20% of savers throughout but giving a £ per kWh saved in the final session via bonus points on top of saving rate.

Even so, does that mean there’s no 100 bonus points for streaking to the last one?

 

[Mrklaw]

Shift usage, not use more.

Sure, some people will have extracted the urine by essentially wasting energy, but for me it was enough to concentrate a few days worth of high usage (charging, dishwasher, washing machine, tumbler, 1 off oven cleaning, having dinner earlier etc.) into that window. It led to me using less energy during other times, including peak times.

The rules as written do have a perverse incentive and one that was likely unintentional (but also so obvious I have doubts), but it’s actually shown what people can do with an incentive. Hopefully the future iteration of the system will use that to encourage people to shift high usage, in the same manner, to a time more beneficial to the grid.

sure but if you’re moving into around that peak spike area you’re adding to already high demand

 

[Skie]

sure but if you’re moving into around that peak spike area you’re adding to already high demand

The peak ramp up in usage is fairly sharp, so only the tail end of the adjustment periods really added to the build up.

In any new scheme they could target an incentivised adjustment period to be the lowest usage period, preferably when supply is outstripping demand similar to when Agile pays you to use power. The calculations could even be tweaked to ensure it’s load shifting and not extra usage to gain more.

 

[Skie]

Saved 1.41 kWh from the 23rd session then? I had bonus points matching the kWh in GBP ×800 to bonus points, without any explanation (yet).

Perhaps they changed their mind and that became the top 20% saver reward overall, not just for the 15th.

Yep.

But saved 7.76kw on the 15th

 

[Pink Duck]

Also sucky for me, since National Grid miscalculated my final session (possibly everyone’s) and ended up 4.8 kWh under what it should have been - so down £19.18

My theory being they had dodgy server date/time calculation code mishandling the review from BST back into GMT. In particular, in-day adjustment on last appears to have been calculated for T−3 to T−0, instead of T−4 to T−1.

 

[Fursty Ferret]

Sure, some people will have extracted the urine by essentially wasting energy, but for me it was enough to concentrate a few days worth of high usage

No piss-taking involved. This policy, laid down by central government, directly penalised the people who chose to invest in energy saving measures. No qualms at all about changing my charging times to peak periods in advance.

Don't forget that Octopus cheerfully pay the statutory minimum (4.1p/kWh) for export before selling it back to you at 10x the price.

 

[phil4]

Also sucky for me, since National Grid miscalculated my final session (possibly everyone’s) and ended up 4.8 kWh under what it should have been - so down £19.18

My theory being they had dodgy server date/time calculation code mishandling the review from BST back into GMT. In particular, in-day adjustment on last appears to have been calculated for T−3 to T−0, instead of T−4 to T−1.

They screwed that up back in Oct when they were doing the trails.

 

[Pink Duck]

Well, what do you know, weekend Twitter support staff member credited £20 by way of goodwill gesture to make up my Saving Sessions shortfall.