Octopus Energy
Octopus Energy are an up-and-coming energy provider that entered the market recently in 2016 (Octopus Energy, n.d.). Octopus Energy was started with the intent to disrupt the UK energy market by providing 100% renewable energy across all their tariffs, which was unheard of in the current market.
Octopus Agile Tariff
One of their most innovative and popular tariffs is the Agile Octopus Tariff which launched in 2018. It made the company the first supplier to maximise smart meter potential by offering a Time-of-Use tariff that also gives customers half hourly access to energy prices. Time-of-Use tariffs are an example of a price-based demand response scheme (Tarish Haider, et al., 2016) that aims to encourage customers to consume electricity outside of peak hours. This type of scheme is beneficial to both the provider and customer where the customer can save money by using electricity outside of peak hours and the provider will be able to deal with high demand without blackouts.
As you can see in Figure 1, Agile Octopus’ peak pricing period runs from 4pm – 7pm daily where prices surge to around 20 – 35p/kWh with a price cap at 35p/kWh for customers at any time of the day. Outside of the peak period Octopus have incorporated a secondary price-based demand response scheme, Real Time Pricing (Tarish Haider, et al., 2016). These schemes offer varying prices of electricity to the customer depending on available generation. For example, if there is a surplus of renewable generation and the provider has a small demand then the price will drop significantly.
Last year alone the Agile Octopus tariff’s price dropped below 2p/kWh 31 times with a few occasions where the customers were paid to take electricity from the grid (Octopus Energy, n.d.). The Agile tariff offers a flat export rate of 5p/kWh throughout the real time pricing period. During the peak pricing period customers can receive more money for exports at 9p/kWh making it an attractive tariff for homeowners with renewable generation.
Figure 1: Octopus Agile Varying Price
(Source: Octopusenergy.com)