Octopus agile

Rates are published for the next day at 4pm. You can see the rates in your account or app (or the better app Octo-Aid)
It’s for electric customers only if you need gas too then you need the Octopus Tracker Tarrif which is daily pricing averaged out from the 30minute rates, so less flexible.

For the past month highest rate has been 32.2p (peak time almost every day are this) lowest has been -0.4p which was 5am Saturday (so for 30 mins they paid me to charge my battery)

If you can be flexible and even better have a battery/solar setup it can be very cheap indeed.

BTW Smart meters can’t handle 30min pricing so you need to use the app and plan.

Octo-Aid handily gives an historic average price based on my actual use not the Octopus average price which is based on 24 hours of all prices.
I averaged based on my actual consumption (I have solar and a 5kw battery so try to be really flexible)
Sat25th = 10.87p/kWh
Fri24th = 17.24p/kWh
Thurs23rd = 13.67p/kWh
Wed22nd = 23.99p/kWh
Tues21st = 23.82p/kWh
Mon20th = 27.86p/kWh

You can tell which days were windy and renewables were abundant 😁

Quite surprising that the rate is consistently below the cap. Did it spike in the cold periods we had at the end of last year/start of this?

I have gas to so looks like not eligible.

@mickyfinn is the 45p daily charge just the standing charge or on top of this?

Standing charge is 48.3p for me. No other costs involved.
If you have gas you can apply for Octopus Tracker (.it’s very new and there maybe a waiting list). A work colleague is on this and he is a saving considerably compared to the cap rates, especially on his Gas.
Unfortunately I wasn’t with Octopus during the big cold snap.Historic rates are somewhere I’ll take a look.
Of course with this kind of Tarrif it could go the other way but they have no lock in and you can switch back to standard anytime

Historic pricing for nerds 😁
https://agileprices.co.uk/?region=F&fromdate=20221231

Meh came here looking for spectacular underwater footage.

We're on Agile with Solar + 10 kWh battery system.

Settled on the following set up: at 3am - 5am the battery charges up to 60% (or not at all if already at or over 60%), so we top up on leccy at around 9p per kWh, but leaving some headroom for solar charge during the day.

This currently seems to work ok, if the day before was sunny, we don't charge as the battery is over the target and if the day was murky, we top up some leccy off the grid, but leave headroom for solar.

Did it spike in the cold periods we had at the end of last year/start of this?

Still capped at 35p / kWh, so never goes above that. Even in the cold periods, it was 20p ish in the middle of the night.

It's a weird tariff, they pseudo make up the unit price based on fairly arbitrary criteria, so it's not related to, say, the spot electricity market.

they pseudo make up the unit price based on fairly arbitrary criteria

😁 Isn’t that how predictions work 😁

https://energy-stats.uk/ has historic data by region.

If you're already on Octopus, there's a few apps (I use Octopus Compare) that you give your API key and it pulls your usage data and works out if Agile or other tariffs would be cheaper.

I was on it for a couple of years, it was crazy cheap through 2020 then when wholesale prices went bananas it was better for us to be on Go. Back to quite similar now, when my current year of Go is up in July I'll check again.

Nothing made up about the unit price, they explain it here: https://octopus.energy/blog/agile-pricing-explained/

It's the half-hour wholesale market price x 2.2 (to cover their distribution costs, etc), add on 12p at peak time (4-7pm), cap at 100p.

Isn’t that how predictions work

It's sort of supposed to be related to green energy availability ie wind...

or maybe I've confuse it with something else..

It is you can see the prices almost always drop considerably after a bright windy day.
Certainly that’s the trend I’ve seen in my area which has a good amount of renewables available.