Looking for a cure to the lock-down blues? The confluence of events during the past two months of 20% lower Grid demand, coupled with great renewable generation weather and agile half hourly tariffs (HHT) now being available to domestic customers has created events rarely seen before called “Price Plunges” ...This is where our power utility Octopus will pay us to use energy for periods of the day !
This is caused when there is too much energy available and its costs money to store it, so utilities pay consumers to take it off their hands. This is similar to the recent oil price retreat into negative territory, because of the cost of storage. Today is the fourth such event in the past two months and today, the 23rd of May, is the most marked with just over half the day’s HHT’s being negative, peaking at -10.78 p/kWh at 2.30pm.
What will this mean for our electricity bill ? From the past blogs, you may recall that our bills had reached an eye-watering £18.8 a day in early February before optimisation. The longer days and good weather of May have enabled us to produce an average of 62kWh/day PV generation and has reduced the daily cost down to £ 3.61/day, but coupling this Octopus Agile Tariff and our new ability to move consumption out of 4-7pm peak charging period, reduced the daily bill down to £0.81 per day !
But we are not done yet ! Today we start selling our excess generation back to the Grid on Octopus’ Outgoing scheme generating up to £ 1.50/day and this will take us into positive territory for the first time ! Now adding today’s price plunge effect will likely pay us a further £ 1.45. Overall today we should be paid over £2 for our electricity !
The key to all of this is the ability to manipulate supply and demand and being paid to store electrical energy in batteries and heat energy in hot water tanks during these price plunge periods and use this energy during peak demand hours.
As Octopus claimed: today marks the “Big Switch On” !
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