Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonatron | Hacker News Reader

I got paid to use electricity this morning: https://agileprices.co.uk/

How have your energy costs looked, overall, over the past 2-3 years? Getting cheaper or more expensive?

I ask because I frequently see posts like this one, but then also that Europeans are paying more than ever etc. Hard to figure if we are putting a dent in anything.

I've been on Agile for about 6 months and my average energy price is around 0.22p/kWh which is significantly less than the standard tariff most people get which is around 0.36p/kWh. There's been a few weeks where prices have been higher but it balances out so far.

I have octopus agile for electricity and octopus tracker for gas. Been on both since February when my last fixed rate ended.

It has worked out great so far, some days when there isn’t much wind can be painful but overall it works out better. Even if it didn’t, I’d rather pay a fair amount than have energy companies rip me off.

Over the last year, my overall average rate on the agile (time of use) tariff has been about £0.19/kWh. It's significantly cheaper than on the standard tariff, which would have been somewhere between £0.28/kWh and £0.35/kWh approx.

Do you still pay the same standing charge? That's where a lot of the cost seems to have shifted (on my non-variable tariff at least).

For some reason the standing charge is a bit less too.

The higher the standing charge as a percentage of the final cost, the less motivation there is to respond to the price signal, which is part of the point of providing varying prices to the end user.

Nice time to turn on a bitcoin miner.

Is there an API to monitor prices?

Octopus do have an API: https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

Didn't know this site existed. Way better than the Octopus app.

There's also a handy twitter account for predicting slightly further ahead: https://twitter.com/agilepredict

“Octo-Aid” is great if your on iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com