End of the 5p cheap rate!

[Burble61]

Folk who also follow the Octopus forum may have already seen reference to this https://policyexchange.org.uk/publicati ... gy-crisis/. Kind of related to the topic (I hope) as it includes yet another initiative that bears upon whether we will see 5p again (or not).

Buried deep in the long report is reference to the Ofgem "Market Wide Half Hour Settlement" programme - in summary, given the installed base of Smart Meters, using the half hour data from domestic consumer to accurately settle costs between generators/retailers and away from the assumed statistical profiles that have had to be used until now based on traditional metering. (The same way that Commercial / Industrial consumers are settled).

At this stage, who knows how this which modify actual energy tariffs for the domestic market, as the programme concentrates on the intra-industry settlement process. But there would seem to be the potential for further significant modifications - or as Ofgem puts it "potential for tariff innovation and load switching".

I can see the benefits of running the system on actual data although as ever, the benefits of Smart Meters seemed to be skewed towards the industry rather than consumers.

[snootsandfruits]

the benefits of Smart Meters seemed to be skewed towards the industry rather than consumers.

This has always seemed to be the case.

One of the benefits of SMETS2 meters was the simplicity of which customers were meant to be able to add their own CAD (consumer access devices) to the smart meter HAN (home area network).
In reality most energy companies make connecting a device very difficult, and this plus the approvals process for new devices means that there's a disappointing small number of them out there. As far as I'm aware, all of them currently require some third party service with zero local data access.

It's telling when even with Octopus, I know of no real way to get your smart meter data without using Octopus' own API, therefore sending the data from your house, to Octopus, and back again. I wonder how much additional power that uses in data centres, and of course as soon as you move supplier you've got to start again.

In theory you should be able to buy something like a smart dishwasher, connect it to the HAN, and have it use your smart meter/tariff information to decide when to switch on.

Without consumers being able to get and use this information easily I think we'll fall far short of the potential of smart metering, to the detriment of everyone.