FiT complaint result!

[Fintray]

SSE were slow a few years back but then it improved vastly, my last reading was sent in on 09/08/22 and payment was in my bank account on 16/08/22 so you wonder why such a difference between customers?

[Oldgreybeard]

SSE were slow a few years back but then it improved vastly, my last reading was sent in on 09/08/22 and payment was in my bank account on 16/08/22 so you wonder why such a difference between customers?

I've heard the same from others, just seems to be a great deal of variability with SSE. For us they have always been very slow to pay, right from the very start. I think we waited over 6 months for the first payment, back in 2014 when the system was installed. I remember this, as the payment arrived just before Christmas and the system went live in the middle of March. The pattern in the past has been that we get a statement letter from SSE, telling us how much we're owed, about two to three weeks after I submit the reading. That letter says that they will pay within 12 weeks.

My last reading was sent on 1st July, after I'd already started the OFGEM complaint, but SSE did include the second quarter payment in the payment they gave us a couple of weeks ago (so about a month or so after submitting the reading). I'm certain they only did that because the OFGEM complaint was in progress, as that payment was given by them in their paper trail submitted to OFGEM about three weeks ago. Be interesting to hear what SSE have to say when they apologise, and whether they will make any efforts to reduce the payment delay.

[Thebeeman]

We've been with EDF from 2011. They reserve the right to pay 90 days after the end of the reading month. Normally we get the payment "invoice" within 2 days of my reading and the bank transfer 1 or 2 days later. According to the lady who comes to read our meter (infrequently) they have been know to tell solar owners when the panels have a problem and are not generating enough due to an inverter problem or similar.

[AE-NMidlands]

Best bit was that OFGEM made it clear in their adjudication that they didn't believe SSE, and that the "evidence" that SSE had submitted (from their own records and accounting system) had obviously been falsified. Whoever retrospectively tried to make their records look as if they had been trying to contact me, allegedly without getting a reply, was too dim to realise that the dates and times they had entered didn't tally at all with the dates and times of the few emails they had actually sent!

It clearly wasn't just a series of errors on their part, they deliberately set out to try and delay paying. The final bit of evidence that showed that this was what they were doing came from the meter reader, a contracted company, as they provided dates of the generation meter having been read, together with data that had been submitted and confirmed as having been received by SSE, which flew in the face of the defence that SSE put forward.

TBH, I think I've worked pretty hard to get that £75 compensation, and I doubt that it made sense in terms of the time I spent on it, but it was the principle that was important to me. Ever since we had the system installed in 2014 I've had problems with late and missed payments. At first SSE claimed this was due to problems with their IT system, but after several years of having to constantly chase them up I became convinced that they were just delaying payments deliberately, as they'd rather hang on to the money than pay it out. It didn't help that we were using SSE as our supplier until a couple of years ago, and our annual cost of consumed electricity has always been a lot lower than the FiT and export payments.

"OVO Energy makes payments after Ofgem has finished its review. Once OVO receives all quarterly meter readings, they send the information to Ofgem through a process called levelisation. Ofgem calculates credits and sends them to OVO, who can then make payments. This takes a little while, so you'll get your payment about eight weeks after the end of the reading month."

I suspect that you're right, and that the compensation payment will be delayed as well. The long delayed FiT payment we received a couple of weeks ago did come from SSE, though, rather than OVO.

We've had a couple of comments here about compensation enforced by the regulator, but I saw that one of the Directors resigned because she felt that the rest were too keen on looking after the suppliers...
now we have https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -customers

Shell has agreed to pay half a million pounds for overcharging thousands of prepayment meter customers on default tariffs over the past three years.
The energy giant’s consumer arm, Shell Energy Retail, will use the cash to refund and compensate 11,275 customers after it discovered it had sent the wrong rates to users’ meters.
It meant that those customers were forced to pay more than allowed under the regulator’s price cap at various times since January 2019.
Prepayment meter users already pay for their energy at a higher rate and include some of the country’s poorest and most vulnerable households. Shell has agreed to automatically refund overcharged customers the £106,000 they are owed in total, pay £400,000 into Ofgem’s consumer redress fund, and make a further £30,970 in extra “goodwill payments” to affected customers.

The energy provider will pay a total of £536,970. Customers are expected to receive refunds worth £9.40 each, on average.

I think it stinks, and can't believe that the poorest people (probably, as they were on prepayment meters) will get less than a tenner! Like OGB's token compensation, I'll bet that the money in the energy company's bank (and the unchallenged gains from swindling other people in the same ways) mean that they are not even out of pocket.

[Eric12]

"OVO Energy will ask for FiT readings every
3 months. Your read dates will change from your current dates to every March, June, September and December. Once you've moved over to OVO, they'll be in touch with the date your next read is due. You won't see a gap in payments."

Does that imply then, that a smart meter is not required to make use of the FIT (SEG) tariff from OVO ?

[Oldgreybeard]

"OVO Energy will ask for FiT readings every
3 months. Your read dates will change from your current dates to every March, June, September and December. Once you've moved over to OVO, they'll be in touch with the date your next read is due. You won't see a gap in payments."

Does that imply then, that a smart meter is not required to make use of the FIT (SEG) tariff from OVO ?

SEG is very different to FiT, and I believe that either a bidirectional smart meter or an export (not generation) meter is needed to claim it. FiT can be claimed without a smart meter, just needs a generation meter. Handy for us as we self consume around 98% of our generation, yet get paid for an assumed export of 50% of generation.

[Eric12]

"OVO Energy will ask for FiT readings every
3 months. Your read dates will change from your current dates to every March, June, September and December. Once you've moved over to OVO, they'll be in touch with the date your next read is due. You won't see a gap in payments."

Does that imply then, that a smart meter is not required to make use of the FIT (SEG) tariff from OVO ?

SEG is very different to FiT, and I believe that either a bidirectional smart meter or an export (not generation) meter is needed to claim it. FiT can be claimed without a smart meter, just needs a generation meter. Handy for us as we self consume around 98% of our generation, yet get paid for an assumed export of 50% of generation.

Okay thanks for the info, I will need to look it up.