overall cost of installing Solar panels
Discussion
One thing that's worth considering is that once you have the installer coming to fit a system, the incremental cost for additional panels is pretty much just the cots of the panels themselves. We went from a 5.2kWp system to 7.9kwP for less that £2K, so if you can use the extra power it is more cost effective to max you panels. You may export more in Summer if you can't use it (with an EV or something) but you will benefit in the winter.
irc said:
If battery storage and realease made sense it swould already be done on a scale. The big batteries that do exist make there money by grid balancing where power is needed quickly and for short periods of time.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epneq4/a-tesla-big...
It is being done on scale, just taking a while to ramp up although there are several GWs already commissioned. The grid services are currently the best revenue source until there are more batteries chasing the revenue than there is demand, some of the ancillary service auctions have cleared at £0, and the more batteries which are built the cheaper the services will get. https://www.vice.com/en/article/epneq4/a-tesla-big...
We are currently in discussions about a 1.6GW battery which is far too big to be used for ancillary services, and I would expect most of the newer ones to do wholesale functions, usually turning over twice in a day - charge overnight, discharge into the morning, then recharge early afternoon and discharge into the evening.
irc said:
If battery storage and realease made sense it swould already be done on a scale. The big batteries that do exist make there money by grid balancing where power is needed quickly and for short periods of time.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epneq4/a-tesla-big...
That's my view. A good friend of mine runs one of the commercial battery operators and I've been through the numbers with him. https://www.vice.com/en/article/epneq4/a-tesla-big...
The reality is that I just can't see how home generation or storage adds up under any metric when accounted for correctly. Every example I have seen is reliant on what in accounting terms would be considered overt fraud.
Another factor. An energy analyst reports industry gossip that Octopus Agile isn't profitable. So making a large investment based on tariffs which may not last is risky.
"Octopus Energy has been a pioneer of flexible tariffs for households, but it’s unclear if it has been able to make any money from them. Industry gossip suggests its Agile tariff has never been profitable, "
https://watt-logic.com/2022/11/04/demand-flexibili...
"Octopus Energy has been a pioneer of flexible tariffs for households, but it’s unclear if it has been able to make any money from them. Industry gossip suggests its Agile tariff has never been profitable, "
https://watt-logic.com/2022/11/04/demand-flexibili...
irc said:
Another factor. An energy analyst reports industry gossip that Octopus Agile isn't profitable. So making a large investment based on tariffs which may not last is risky.
"Octopus Energy has been a pioneer of flexible tariffs for households, but it’s unclear if it has been able to make any money from them. Industry gossip suggests its Agile tariff has never been profitable, "
https://watt-logic.com/2022/11/04/demand-flexibili...
Octopus is a really awkward operation to discuss on PH as it has captured an element of religious devoteeism as per things like Tesla or crypto tricks. For some it is not to be questioned. "Octopus Energy has been a pioneer of flexible tariffs for households, but it’s unclear if it has been able to make any money from them. Industry gossip suggests its Agile tariff has never been profitable, "
https://watt-logic.com/2022/11/04/demand-flexibili...
There's an awful lot of stuff on their website that from an investment analyst perspective triggers warning bells of retail consumer orientate 'illusions'.
There is a belief that their Kraken tech will be adopted by many competitors but this doesn't usually occur in industry so the odds favour competitors preferring to spend huge sums for inferior solutions but for them to be in-house and theirs.
Ultimately, their core business is running a book. Hoping that their traders can out play their consumer base when it comes to betting on the balance of overnight discounted usage v premium daytime usage. On the book side you do have a huge advantage in that you can rest assured that almost all your customers have their calculations wrong and have hopefully skewed them completely the wrong way but all books have losing streaks when the client base is accidentally correct and all aligned. Needing a guarantee to pass as a going concern does suggest they're running a pretty tight ship and n that regard.
They also have a couple of core risks out of their control which is that firstly they have to buy carbon credits in order to fudge their 'zero emissions' PR spin, the cost of which going forward is simply unknown and their accounts to date show no ability to handle a significant spike in carbon credit costs. The other risk is that the Govt will act to stop them selling dirt cheap wind energy at high cost gas generated electricity prices.
Actually, there is a third risk which is the seemingly inevitable Labour Govt and their plan to launch a tax payer funded assault on producers and vendors via the pseudo nationalisation mechanism of Great British Energy, which like anything that contains the word British for the purpose of giving the thickest people in society priapismic release and being met by the endless flow of free tax payer money will be a total disaster but not before it has imploded the private sector and plunged the U.K. into darkness and total reliance on imported fossil fuels.
The latter risk is arguably the only logical reason to to take £20,000 of valuable cash and convert it before Labour seize it, into PV and battery landfill so as to at least be able to hedge out some of the catastrophic collapse of the U.K. energy sector.
DonkeyApple said:
Ultimately, their core business is running a book.
Their core business is not running a book. Their business is developing the software; the customers are loss making and have existed mainly to test their own solutions.That said, the purchase of Bulb is a big step into the customer market and so they'll need to turn the customer side into a profit making enterprise, but it hasn't been in the past.
Condi said:
DonkeyApple said:
Ultimately, their core business is running a book.
Their core business is not running a book. Their business is developing the software; the customers are loss making and have existed mainly to test their own solutions.That said, the purchase of Bulb is a big step into the customer market and so they'll need to turn the customer side into a profit making enterprise, but it hasn't been in the past.
The near doubling of revenues stems from the extremely aggressive expansion of retail customers to run the energy book against.
In years to come the Kraken business may become larger than the energy trading business but it is nowhere near that yet.
The core business is an energy book that isn't yet profitable, despite Kraken's aim to make it profitable and be the proof for licensing the technology side globally. It's also the trading side which carries all the systemic risk to the underlying business so is very much its core.
Condi said:
DonkeyApple said:
Ultimately, their core business is running a book.
Their core business is not running a book. Their business is developing the software; the customers are loss making and have existed mainly to test their own solutions.That said, the purchase of Bulb is a big step into the customer market and so they'll need to turn the customer side into a profit making enterprise, but it hasn't been in the past.
There were lots of small utility and ISP operations whose business model seemed to be 'acquire customer base, get taken over'.
Octopus IMHO are rather better than that, but if they sold up to Evil Corp, the UK customer base would be a rich lode of profit for someone.
DonkeyApple said:
Last accounts showed £2000m of revenue with Kraken contributing £70m.
Revenue is irrelevant - retail customers are loss making and have been for some time. The software they have built and continue to build is being increasingly used across the industry, not just in the UK but abroad as well. Condi said:
DonkeyApple said:
Last accounts showed £2000m of revenue with Kraken contributing £70m.
Revenue is irrelevant - retail customers are loss making and have been for some time. The software they have built and continue to build is being increasingly used across the industry, not just in the UK but abroad as well. And how do you reconcile the massive expansion in retail client acquisition or the fact that Kraken is supposed to make the management of those clients profitable but hasn't managed to do so yet?
It's an energy trading business focussed on massive retail consumer expansion that has a technology division that should grow over the coming years.
As an Octopus customer I will say their website is very good. I don't have a smart meter and have no interest in their variable tarrifs but it is night and day using their website. Supplying readings. Amending direct debits. Checking previous bills.
It is good enough that I would need to be saving a good amount of cash to transfer elsewhere.
I place a premium on user friendlyness. So they are doing that right
Same with First Direct. I could make a few hundred quid switching bank accounts but I like First Direct. Great app and if you need to talk to a human it is easy to get through to someone who speaks English as a first language.
It is good enough that I would need to be saving a good amount of cash to transfer elsewhere.
I place a premium on user friendlyness. So they are doing that right
Same with First Direct. I could make a few hundred quid switching bank accounts but I like First Direct. Great app and if you need to talk to a human it is easy to get through to someone who speaks English as a first language.
irc said:
As an Octopus customer I will say their website is very good. I don't have a smart meter and have no interest in their variable tarrifs but it is night and day using their website. Supplying readings. Amending direct debits. Checking previous bills.
It is good enough that I would need to be saving a good amount of cash to transfer elsewhere.
I place a premium on user friendlyness. So they are doing that right
Same with First Direct. I could make a few hundred quid switching bank accounts but I like First Direct. Great app and if you need to talk to a human it is easy to get through to someone who speaks English as a first language.
Octopus is a great business and showing the way that other vendors will need to head. It is good enough that I would need to be saving a good amount of cash to transfer elsewhere.
I place a premium on user friendlyness. So they are doing that right
Same with First Direct. I could make a few hundred quid switching bank accounts but I like First Direct. Great app and if you need to talk to a human it is easy to get through to someone who speaks English as a first language.
One interesting aspect for the industry being that client interfaces were never needed u til recently so their IT is probably akin to the retail banking industry decades ago.
However, none of the utilities represent proper fair value due to the entrenched system of the end consumer being forced into contracts that lock out competition.
DonkeyApple said:
However, none of the utilities represent proper fair value due to the entrenched system of the end consumer being forced into contracts that lock out competition.
When energy companies are losing money, the customer is getting more than fair value, the energy company is subsidising the customer's bills due to the price cap. It's the same as any other service with a contract, eg internet. mobile phone etc.
Condi said:
DonkeyApple said:
However, none of the utilities represent proper fair value due to the entrenched system of the end consumer being forced into contracts that lock out competition.
When energy companies are losing money, the customer is getting more than fair value, the energy company is subsidising the customer's bills due to the price cap. It's the same as any other service with a contract, eg internet. mobile phone etc.
DonkeyApple said:
It's not though. The cost of delivery will be uniform but generation isn't. And they're not losing money during this period, what we are considering is the future not the brief moment today.
The cost of delivery isn't uniform because the demand shape isn't uniform. It costs more to supply every customer at 6pm on a cold winter evening than it does at 2pm on a sunny summer afternoon. Who knows what the profitability of customer accounts will be in the years to come. Customer accounts have not been profitable for a long time, hence why the large "Big 6" have on the whole offloaded them.
Condi said:
DonkeyApple said:
It's not though. The cost of delivery will be uniform but generation isn't. And they're not losing money during this period, what we are considering is the future not the brief moment today.
The cost of delivery isn't uniform because the demand shape isn't uniform. It costs more to supply every customer at 6pm on a cold winter evening than it does at 2pm on a sunny summer afternoon. Who knows what the profitability of customer accounts will be in the years to come. Customer accounts have not been profitable for a long time, hence why the large "Big 6" have on the whole offloaded them.
The revenue shape for retail was depressed by all the weak 'disrupter' entrants who who subsidising prices with investor capital hoping to get to critical mass before they went bust. They all went bust and all those customers are back onto the books of the firms that prefer to sell for more than they buy.
What might be easier would be if you were to explain why being tied to only buying from one of many suppliers is beneficial to the end consumer? Same for using mobile data as that would be a similar scenario where the consumer is trapped to one provider.
Edited by DonkeyApple on Saturday 5th November 13:55
The customer want to pay one price whenever they want to use power, whether that be 6pm in December or 2pm in June. The energy companies manage the risk of power being £5/kwh in December vs £0/kwh in June via contracts with demands which can be forecasts. If customers were able to move around freely at short notice it would be almost impossible to manage the risk of the higher price days, and so all energy companies would increase prices to cover the risk of getting loads of customers on a high price (loss making) day, but them going elsewhere on a lower priced (more profitable) day.
It will likely come for some customers, but only as a priced linked to wholesale prices, and so far there has been limited appetite for that exposure from customers and would require far more involvement than customers have now. Maybe in future it will happen using software to manage it on behalf of customers, but that is a long way from where we are now, and would need to work for the energy companies as well as customers for the reason explained above.
It will likely come for some customers, but only as a priced linked to wholesale prices, and so far there has been limited appetite for that exposure from customers and would require far more involvement than customers have now. Maybe in future it will happen using software to manage it on behalf of customers, but that is a long way from where we are now, and would need to work for the energy companies as well as customers for the reason explained above.
Condi said:
The customer want to pay one price whenever they want to use power, whether that be 6pm in December or 2pm in June. The energy companies manage the risk of power being £5/kwh in December vs £0/kwh in June via contracts with demands which can be forecasts. If customers were able to move around freely at short notice it would be almost impossible to manage the risk of the higher price days, and so all energy companies would increase prices to cover the risk of getting loads of customers on a high price (loss making) day, but them going elsewhere on a lower priced (more profitable) day.
It will likely come for some customers, but only as a priced linked to wholesale prices, and so far there has been limited appetite for that exposure from customers and would require far more involvement than customers have now. Maybe in future it will happen using software to manage it on behalf of customers, but that is a long way from where we are now, and would need to work for the energy companies as well as customers for the reason explained above.
It wouldn't though as the end customer can't shop around outside of the actual eco system. The suppliers would need to compete for the business. Your argument relies on one supplier being able to supply all users, which they couldn't as well as customers buying outside of the system which they couldn't. It will likely come for some customers, but only as a priced linked to wholesale prices, and so far there has been limited appetite for that exposure from customers and would require far more involvement than customers have now. Maybe in future it will happen using software to manage it on behalf of customers, but that is a long way from where we are now, and would need to work for the energy companies as well as customers for the reason explained above.
DonkeyApple said:
It wouldn't though as the end customer can't shop around outside of the actual eco system. The suppliers would need to compete for the business. Your argument relies on one supplier being able to supply all users, which they couldn't as well as customers buying outside of the system which they couldn't.
I am very confused. Anyway, whatever, shopping around for power for short time periods is not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.
Battery costs are coming down and are viable at grid scale.
Domestic solar needs to come down a bit more, but can be seen as a hedge against any future energy price rises, and some people may simply like the idea of generating their own power or saving carbon emissions.
I think that covers much of the thread...
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