I have seen some videos on YouTube recently where a number of people are moving away from Octopus Energy for various reasons, mainly because it makes financial sense for them.
Not all of these moves were smooth or without issue, so before I consider moving, would I be better off financially by doing so?
As such I thought I would also investigate the various options and how I would fare price wise should I move.
I am currently on Intelligent Octopus Go, my previous car charger had stopped working and would not have qualified, so I made a point of installing a compatible replacement at the end of last year.
I used to be on E-ON’s standard Tariff and for a short time, after switching to Octopus Energy, was on Flexible Octopus, I will use these as some baselines, but will then compare with Octopus Go, E-ON Next Drive and British Gas Driver V7.
I currently qualify for the Solar Export Guarantee (SEG) with Octopus Energy, so can use this with their Outgoing Octopus Tariff at £0.15/kWh, my installation is not MCS certified, so I may/may not be able to move to some of the other suppliers anyway, but let’s ignore that for the purposes of this paper exercise.
I am not applying the Outgoing Octopus SEG tariff to Flexible Octopus, so it can be a closer comparison to the E-ON standard tariff, and Octopus Go has its own export tariff.
I plotted each of the tariffs against my actual usage for each month this year, peak, off-peak and export, months prior to April I had no Solar or batteries, so are a good base load comparison between the various tariffs.
I have ignored the variability in off-peak hours as this only varies by an hour or two and my batteries all charge within the first 3, so the additional hours make little difference, except on days where there is poor sun and my batteries drain early.
For every month, I am better off on either Octopus Go, or Intelligent Octopus Go, the intelligent version coming into its own once I brought my batteries online in April, at no point do any of the other tariffs come close.
My use case is considerably different from many others, in that I have a high base load of around 1.7Kw per hour, so I only export on days where I can keep the batteries full, supply my house needs and only then export any excess, your use case may be significantly different.
For my use case, the increased SEG figure of £0.165 for E-ON Next Drive is completely negated by the much higher standing charge of £0.712, over the Intelligent Octopus Go figure of £0.4557, because I simply don’t export enough electricity to benefit from the higher export figure.
Even on my best month to date, July, where I exported nearly 180kWh of electricity, the difference in export earnings between Intelligent Octopus Go and E-On Next Drive was £2.70, however the difference in standing charges was £7.95.
Additionally the off-peak rate is effectively the same as Intelligent Octopus Go, but the peak rate is higher by £0.04/kWh, so no savings to be made there either.
It is a similar story with British Gas Driver V7, the export earnings would be the same, however the standing charges would be £6.59 more expensive, additionally the peak and off-peak prices are higher, so this one was never going to win.
Compared to the E-On standard and the Flexible Octopus tariffs I am already over £1000,000 better off in just 7 months!
TL;DR
For my use case none of the alternative tariffs make any kind of financial sense, combined this with the fact that they would probably not accept my non MCS approved installation anyway – I’ll stay where I am for now.