Octopus Go, Go Faster and IO temporarily suspended for new signups and renewals

[nowty]

Seems the new government capping is sticking a spanner in the works for future fixed deals, this seems to have come out of nowhere today.

When it comes back will it be better or worse ?, I can take an educated guess which way it will go.
If you pardon the pun.

[Oldgreybeard]

I may be being a bit cynical, but both Go and Go Faster were carefully structured to be extremely profitable, by selling one to three hours of cheap rate electricity at the full day rate. The basic pattern of pricing hasn't changed much in recent years, a glance at demand and pricing shows that there has always been a six to seven hour cheap rate period every night. Octopus chose to market Go and Go Faster as cut down versions of Economy 7, with two to three hours lopped off the true cheap rate period.

This isn't knocking Octopus, they are a business that thrives on selling what seem to be innovative products. One consistent theme has been that they have attracted a great deal of positive publicity for initiatives that, in reality, don't actually save consumers much money at all. Agile is a good example, as was the scheme to pay cash to those that cut peak usage. Analysis of all these schemes/tariffs shows that they were excellent marketing ploys, but in reality none were significantly cheaper, or even slightly cheaper, than much older peak and off-peak tariff schemes.

I've been keeping a spreadsheet for around 4 to 5 years now, comparing our usage and cost with any new tariff that has come out and looks like it might offer a better deal to anyone that does as we do, and switch most of their usage to the night time cheaper wholesale price period. None of the new and innovative tariffs has yet beaten the old Economy 7 tariff, although there were a few months in the early days of Agile when it looked as if it might get pretty close. For us, neither Go nor Go Faster, has yet beaten E7, in fact neither have come that close to being cheaper overall.

No one comes close to Octopus when it comes to marketing and PR, they are, without a doubt, very good at promoting their services and convincing people that they are better value than any other supplier. If they were genuinely cheaper for us then I would have switched to them a couple of years ago, but so far they just haven't been cheap enough to make the switch worthwhile, plus they haven't been that helpful when I've phoned them to try and get details of the terms and conditions of their tariffs.

[nowty]

So I've been thinking about what the future is for these TOU tariffs for the past few minutes and I reckon,

1) If they keep the rates fixed, there will be no government support and therefore the prices may go up bonkers style.

2) If they change them to variable, can they still have any government support and turn into something similar to E7. , which would in effect still be fixed for two years. Maybe a little less than E7 like 12p cheapslot and a bit more for peak at 50p.

3) They get scrapped as unworkable with government cap so we all end up moving to E7 land with 15p / kWh cheapslot. Unless we end up in a state of, sorry you need an E7 meter for that and no you cannot change to E7 cos you've already accepted a smart meter and there are no E7 meters left.

[Oldgreybeard]

The reality is that boring old E7 was always pretty good value. Until April this year we were paying 7.56p/kWh for 7 hours each night, plenty of time to charge the house battery, car battery and hot water at the cheap rate, without exceeding the 15kVA supply power limit.

The problem with E7 is that it just didn't sound sexy enough in marketing terms. Go, with only 4 hours of cheap rate juice grabbed attention, even though it made no sense at all in any sort of direct comparison, given that the cheap rate period was 3 hours shorter. Those extra three hours for E7 over Go (or two hours for Go Faster) make a significant difference to anyone with an all-electric house that has an EV and house batteries, as it means they can use far more cheap rate juice. For those with storage heating staying with E7 was a no brainer, as a lot of older storage heaters take longer to heat their bricks up, because of thermal conductivity limits (they end up cycling their heaters on and off for the last couple of hours of charging).

For us, our heating really needs as long to charge as possible, as the heat pump struggles to charge the floor at more than about 4kW, not because it's underpowered, but because if the flow temperature was turned up anymore (to enable more heat to be pumped into the floor) then there would be a big temperature overshoot the following day. Anything under about 6 hours charge time tends to be too short in cold weather, and that's ruled out both Go and Go Faster as viable options (although they were both ruled out as they need a smart meter, anyway).

I can't help thinking that the government have gone down this smart meter rabbit hole based on a false premise, that smart meters would save people a lot of money. Everything I've seen suggests that a boring old E7 meter does every bit as good a job of savings consumers money, and of encouraging demand shifting to the low demand period, than any smart meter. I seriously doubt that the IHD, that has been hyped up as a means to encourage consumers to shift their usage to lower demand periods, has had any real effect at all.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are actually the best ones, and it's hard to get simpler than a dual rate meter with an integral time switch. The time switches are only accurate to about a couple of minutes, so they inherently ensure asynchronous load switching (something that has required a change in the law for car chargers - the internet time is just too accurate). These meters are easy to read, anyone can easily understand that using more at the peak rate is far more costly than using more at the off-peak rate. These meters don't rely on flaky radio connections that, at the moment, mean that around 10% to 20% of all UK consumers will never be able to have a smart meter.

All told, there is a great deal to be said for promoting the E7 metering system. It meets the UK need to encourage load shifting to the 6 to 7 hours overnight period when we tend to have a surplus of generation and distribution capacity. They are easy to understand, don't rely on flaky apps or comms to work and provide the required "jitter" on load switching times. Hard to find an argument as to why they aren't good enough, apart from the fact that tyey do not include a remotely controllable on/off switch, as all smart meters do.

[marshman]

__

[Oldgreybeard]

I think we may well see a shift towards more E7 tariffs, or at least, more E7 like. It's very clear from the demand data that we still have a very large discrepancy between the off-peak period (6 or 7 hours every night) and the peak period. Doesn't matter when you choose to look at Gridwatch, the pattern is always very similar, with demand dropping by around 30% to 50% every night, regular as clockwork.

[Swwils]

I very much like this capped Agile import but uncapped agile export though. Had a few negative plunges recently and also export rate is above gas price almost all the time.

In winter I am expecting some ridiculous stuff. It's already happening with export at 38p tomorrow.

[Stinsy]

ToU tariffs have fallen through the cracks of this government bailout.

I don’t understand how Agile treats each 30-min slot as an individual entity and applies the government bailouts rules to it but GO doesn’t. 40p isn’t much higher than 35p and I don’t use much peak electric so it isn’t a huge deal for me. But they are consumer-facing prices. Octopus aren’t getting their share of the government’s £150bn bailout for Go customers so are clearly hurting badly by promoting the tariff.

However, this winter we have a bigger-than-ever problem of consumers using a big proportion of their electric in the evening peak and therefore forcing the burning of gas for electricity generation.


Maybe Go will come back as a “variable” tariff with contract wording similar to Agile so that bailout money can be applied. They could even have 3 price points: 4hrs cheap, 16hrs standard, 4hrs peak.

[nowty]

ToU tariffs have fallen through the cracks of this government bailout.

I don’t understand how Agile treats each 30-min slot as an individual entity and applies the government bailouts rules to it but GO doesn’t. 40p isn’t much higher than 35p and I don’t use much peak electric so it isn’t a huge deal for me. But they are consumer-facing prices. Octopus aren’t getting their share of the government’s £150bn bailout for Go customers so are clearly hurting badly by promoting the tariff.

The issue which seems to have come out of nowhere 10 days after 1st Oct is that fixed rate tariffs for new or existing customers renewing are not covered by the price guarantee.

For most folk currently on Go, they are covered by the price guarantee, at least in some way, until their current tariff expires. Agile by its nature is a variable tariff so it is still covered even after 1st Oct for new or renewing customers.

The solution for Octopus might be quite simple and it may be just a matter of changing the wording, so it aligns to the capped periods in the same way that E7 does.

[Oldgreybeard]

E7 isn't capped directly, suppliers are free to juggle the prices so that some (i.e. me) are now paying about 2.35 times more for their "capped" standard variable rate E7 electricity because of the "54%" supposed cap applied in April.

If E7 were capped equably, then we wouldn't be paying more than double for electricity now compared to last winter. The way suppliers can play tunes with the prices as long as they can show, by some arcane and near-invisible process that their "average" customer has had their price capped within the 54% limit.

May be Octopus don't want to play the games that the other suppliers are engaged in to push up the off-peak prices out of proportion to the peak rate increases.