My Octopus Agile &Go Tariff analysis website

Yep, sounds a plan.

The beauty of having options is choosing the one that bests suits you and your circumstances.

For me, i’m exporting waaaaay more than 50%… its closer to 75% as I have no battery or EV yet.

But what about this for a plan with your Powerwall?
Fill your battery up with free solar and then sell some of it back between 4pm and 6pm at 11p per unit. :wink:

The Agile tariff is now over 18 months old and I was looking back and the history of the pricing yesterday. Geek that I am!! :rofl:

So, what’s driving the price down?

  • More renewables? ie 24hr wind contribution? and more Solar?
  • Overall downward trend in wholesale pricing? (driven by low gas prices?)
  • Octopus getting a better handle on pricing versus demand versus profitability?

Or a combination of everything? :smiley:

Been a while since I posted some Agile prices… here’s last night.

5p per unit for around 6 hours straight from midnight onwards.

This is certainly a growing trend. :+1:

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LOW, LOW, LOW.

One-third of a penny per unit tonight!!

The problem I see with agile tariffs, at least for me, is that you can’t completely predict when the cheapest periods will be. I charge both my Model S and Powerwall 2 on night rate electricity and am currently on the EDF Easy Online 18 month tariff which is 4.9p/kWh night (7 hours) and about 24.6p/kWh peak. These lowest and maximum rates are similar to your Octopus Agile real rates, but the high peak is much longer on the EDF tariff. Thos doesn’t bother me because my Powerwall 2 should supply all my Peak rate demand.

So my problem with the Octopus Agile tariff is that I set the night period on the Powerwall 2 and set the start of charge the on the Model S so that they only use the low night rate and I have 7 hours of that. Until we get smart Powerwall and Model S charging times that tie in with the agile tariffs I can’t accurately set the timers to be sure to use the cheapest rates.

I do have another problem with the Easy Online tariff, which required the installation of a Smart Meter, something I was rather reluctant to do, with good reason it seems. Until the smart meter was fitted a week ago, I wan’t using any peak rate electricity, according to both my old drum meter and the Powerwall PVOutput data. However, the smart meter is clocking up a steady demand of about 0.1kW all the time. That may not sound much but equates to over £150 per annum! Investigations are under way. Before you make observations on this problem, please read my detailed correspondence on the Tesla Motors Club Energy forum at
[https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/gateway-2-and-smart-meter-accuracy.172604/]
I am aware of potential sampling errors at low energy flows.

This is where the code / app of the batteries / chargers needs to be better imho.

With Octopus publishing data via their API its upto the app owners to hook into this to allow charging when appropriate (ie when cheapest). They should be no need to ‘predict’ or hand crank charging times when the data is fully available each evening for the next day.

The Ohme charger for example does this. https://www.ohme-ev.com/

The latest fruits of my coding labour is a new Twitter account (@energystatsuk) that tweets out and graphs the next days Octopus Agile tariff data each evening.

https://twitter.com/energystatsuk

Its work in progress, so if anyone has any thoughts or comments please let me know.

Utter Madness on Octopus Agile tariff tonight.

Over 5 hours of negative pricing, so you GET PAID to use as much electricity as you want.

Min: -1.8p (02:30)
Max: 25.3p (17:00)
Average: 6.8p
Av Excl Peak: 4.2p
Go Period (0030-0430): -0.8p
Peak Time (1600-1900): 24.0p

Stats via https://www.energy-stats.uk/

Follow on Twitter: @energystatsuk

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It gets even better tonight… get paid almost 5p per unit!!!

What is this windy madness!!

I was asked if I could add the daily Agile pricing in table format.

Whilst I can’t guarantee I can add everything asked for, this one seemed to work out ok.

So I’ve added table based pricing as an alternative to the graphs/charts to each of the 14 DNO regional Agile and Agile Outgoing pages.

For example: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-yorkshire/

Hope this helps folks.

I’ve made some changes to my code over the weekend which should now enable quicker updates to the website (https://www.energy-stats.uk/) and posting the Agile pricing summary graph out via @energystatsuk

I used to have a set cron job at 6pm that did all the work, but i’ve now put some ongoing checks from 4pm onwards looking for new pricing via the API and acting upon them when I see them posted.

Its seems to have been stable over the past few days, so hopefully will continue to work as planned in to the future. :+1:

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I expect this would kill graph caching efficiency, but what about somehow highlighting the current 1/2 slow with a vertical coloured bar ? You’d have to redraw each 30 minutes, but that should still not be too bad ?

As I use Grafana to display the graphs on the site i’m really bound by the functionality that it can provide.

I managed to spend a bit of time over Christmas and New Year coding some new functionality for the site that I’ve just put live.

Download historical Agile and Agile Outgoing data.

Far and away the most frequent request I get to the site is “Where can I get full historical pricing data for Agile and/or Agile Outgoing?”

Usually cos they want to do their own geeky analysis of the figures.

Agile started on 18th February 2018.

Agile Outgoing started on 15th May 2019.

Both data sets go right back to day one for each tariff will be updated every day with the new pricing from the Octopus API, so usually sometime after around 4pm.

If you’ve had the daily graph tweet from @energystatsuk then you know the underlying data will have been updated for that day.

https://www.energy-stats.uk/download-historical-pricing-data/

Hope you find this useful.

Just added a new graph to the site on each of the 14 regional “Go versus Agile” pages.

This new one is Go versus Agile (00:30 to 04:30) for the previous year, but shows Agile as a weekly average.

For example: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-go-versus-agile-london/

Hope this helps.

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It was clear that comparing Go (00:30 to 04:30 with Agile (00:30 to 04:30) pricing is an unfair comparison.

I think a fairer comparison is Go versus an average of the lowest 4 hours each day of Agile, so the cheapest 8 x 30 min slots each day.

Note: The 4 hours (8 x 30 mins slots) may not well not be sequential. They could be picked randomly from throughout the day.

From today, you can now see those comparisons on each of 14 regional Go versus Agile page.

For example: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-go-versus-agile-london/

The same cheapest 4hr average stats are also available on the weekly summary graphs too that are on the same page.

Hope this helps.

Fill your boots tonight on Agile and get paid for using energy!!!

Agile tariff is two years old today… here’s what two years worth of minimum, average and maximum pricing looks like.

Charge all the things tonight!!

My little website and twitter project has become so popular that Octopus Energy themselves got in touch to ask me all about it.

Obviously, I was more than happy to have a geeky chat with them!! :smile:

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