The other option is to install a battery system, which then opens up some other tariffs. Octopus Agile is better than Flux, Cosy…… except between 4-7pm and at more than 90% of other times.
My observations using Octopus Compare are that wind drives the price more than solar. If you are prepared to be agile about times to use the grid to charge a battery you can help the grid and help yourself.
When the weather is very cold it still seems that there are cheap times at night because the extra fossil fuel generation can’t be turned off. You may even find that there are more than 3 hours of cheap electric. The electric companies employ statisticians to work out their fixed rates. Likewise the generators when they bid in the more volatile short term market. They really aren’t going to predict or better the daily rates.
The ideal would be that the local grid people get off their backside about enabling EV chargers to discharge to the home at least.
The downside of Ripple is that you only earn what the installation generates, which doesn’t include the significant cost of grid distribution, thus the reduced income compared to your own rooftop PV.
The upside is that it costs far less to buy into Ripple than it does to instal your own solar panels with the equivalent capacity, so it’s not as bad a return on investment as your 4p vs 15p comparison suggests.
It’s probably not as simple as this, but a quick calculation of the numbers applicable to my domestic situation, using the ripple calculator, shows the return to be about 9% per annum. That’s not than twice my savings rate. I know it will be dependent on many factors, but I think that beats paying for solar on our roof.
I’ve been thinking about solar for a while, but not entirely convinced it’s the best bet environmentally versus just buying green energy. Investing in infrastructure renewable seems much more environmentally sound, hopefully suffers fewer losses, involves less CO2 in it’s construction.
For me it’s a twofold decision, investment and CO2 benefits, Ripple seems great from both perspectives.
Anyway, really interesting reading about Ripple - thanks to all who posted about it @JimDog@Thegreatroberto (apologies if I missed anyone!)
I think Ripple is a good option to consider if you can’t do rooftop solar, and a step up from just using a renewable only tariff as you are funding part of an actual new solar or wind installation.
You can start off small if you’re unsure, as the minimum spend is just £25. The max you can buy is 120% of your annual electricity usage, as they want to keep it as a co-operative rather than allowing people to use it as a larger investment. Their first members signed up before the energy crisis, and unexpectedly did very well out of it when wholesale prices went through the roof, demonstrating how it can be an effective smoothing mechanism during market volatility.
Hi, our roof faces ESE and WNW with expansion options on flat roofs and it appears to model rather well aswe have no shade. So we are going for a PV panel system using relatively high energy output cells.
The cost of panels has massively dropped over the last 12 months or so, and inverters are not expensive either… the only item which is chunkier in cost is the battery should you want it and those have got sigifincatly cheaper recently too… and of course the hire of scaffolding to put up the panels.
We have decided to go of it using a GivEnergy hybrid system - and getting our Octopus smart meter tomorrow which allows for dynamic pricing should we wish to use it.
That’s exactly the same orientation as our house, and again we have no shade. Are you having panels front and back? One thing that puts me off is stories about poor installers who damage the roof, and systems that are under or oversized. We were quoted about £12,000 for a system through the local council auction, but I got cold feet. I do like the idea of course, but it all seems a bit of a minefield.
Hi, yes panels front and back. Yes I can understand that concern, but in our case my son in law’s company is undertaking the work and so I feel comfortable.
However realistically any reputable installer will be fine - and they will carry insurance should any issue arise.
But yes looking at the ins and outs of different systems is not helped by non standardised terminology, so there is a bit of investment of time to get upto speed with the solutions and products… but I found the GivEnergy hybrid system pretty well met what I wanted - and I liked the linkage integrated with Octopus on when to take off or put into the grid for best advantage.
Our system will be installed to allow future easy installation of EV charge points, as well as expansion for connection of additional panels for the flat roofs. It will also contain a manual switch to operate entirely isolated off grid rather than automatic - as the number of power cuts we receive in our village has drastically reduced as the over head wire infrastructure has been modernised.
I think £11 to 12 k is quite good for a 5kW to 6kW PV system with a 5kW hybrid inverter with 7.5 kW input and a 9.7 kW battery supporting off grid isolation (for power cuts) - including labour and scaffolding.
I too tried the local council auction and felt i was being scalped, talking to a council person……was underwhelming in terms of knowledge. Still sitting on the fence.
That sounds a lot, we paid £3750 for our small 3kw system, solar only, no batteries.
We didn’t need scaffolding as it was installed on our garage at the end of the garden. This was in October 2022.
We’re looking at approximately 6 years payback based on our results so far.
I’m not convinced that batteries are necessarily worthwhile. They are expensive and I tend to view the grid as a ‘virtual battery’. I.e. I can export electricity to Octopus during the day at 15p a unit and buy at between 12p to 22p (typical tracker prices) so the export price subsidises usage when we don’t have solar. My thoughts are that topping up batteries using solar doesn’t save a significant sum although there are some different tariffs that do allow some discounted rates for filling up batteries in off peak periods.
Our net bill for last month was just over £27 including standing charge. We mostly heat the hot water using the immersion in summer so consumed very little gas, so that bill was only £10 including standing charge. We’re on Octopus Tracker for both.
I am interested in the Ripple deal but something confuses me.
They way I understand it is that:
I buy a share and that share buys into the wind farm that generates the energy to the house.
From the wind farm the energy is sold to the network for 6.55p/kWh (they state the price it costs to generate and not the market rate)
Octopus then charges me 22.60p/kWh for that electricity to my house, as well as still paying for a standing charge (which I thought was supposed to pay for the network delivery)
The way I understand it is the big winner is Octopus, not me, or the supplier.
Am I thinking about this completely the wrong way?
Your Octopus or other regular tariff is completely separate from Ripple, and you can continue to choose whatever tariff you want after you buy into Ripple.
What you earn from Ripple is currently passed on to you via your energy supplier, so you would normally use that to offset your bill.
The reason you only get credited with a wholesale price is that you’ve only bought power generation from them. Buying shares in a solar or wind farm doesn’t buy you a share of the national grid who need to be paid to distribute it.
None of this is cheap. It is an investment and payback will deoend on a number of issues. My 2 off 9.5kWh batteries earn their money. Charged when proce is cheap and discharge before the cheap rate starts again. Youll not make millions, but it more than offsets my standing charge. PV is the icing. Ripple is there to offset my has bill.
I don’t think that’s right. Their website states"Your energy supplier buys your electricity from the project and supplies it to your home via the grid." and there are only a few partners (Coop Energy, EOnNext, Unity Energy) and they state a few more are coming on board. Having looked into it more I didn’t appreciate the ‘other’ costs involved in the network, and how on our bills the unit price in no way reflects the actual cost of the unit, but lots of add-ons too. Still interested though.
It’s not just the ability to export surplus, but also the ability to run the house off cheap electricity and export at peak times (well on Flux). I posted my monthly imports and exports on the solar and battery thread recently.
In the context of this thread, fixing will never better Agile rates unless there is a market crisis that goes outside what the statisticians have built in (the Ukraine conflict should be now).
I have a friend who gets very poor performance from his solar panels, mainly due to shading from trees which are not on his land. He installed batteries and uses them almost exclusively to draw power at Octopus off-peak rates and use it at peak time. He did the sums on a spreadsheet, and despite only charging the battery from his solar generation occasionally, he’s still expecting a fairly short payback time on the batteries.
In 18 months I have drawn very little off the grid other than during the cheap period. It’s only during a cold spell when the ASHP is running a lot (even then trying to avoid the the high demand period) that I use the grid outside the cheap period.
The figures since 26 January 2023 are 9006.83 total of which 8050.1 cheap. Anyone buying a battery should be aware that the round trip efficiency can be between 80-90%. I think the figures quoted are misleading.
I am taking the view that the best way to avoid the efficiency issue is to run the home off the grid during the more extended cheap periods available on Agile. One needs to factor in the efficiency (and battery life) when deciding what price is cheap.
Sort of what I do. I charge batteries each night and then ensure they are nearly flat before the cheap rate kicks in.
But of course, that is what our DNO wants us to do: use our battery infrastructure to help balance the grid. And if it works financially for me, why not?