I was with Bulb until their poor customer service drove me away. So I hope that Octopus 'wins' the corporate culture battle as Greg Jackson says it will.

The new entrants were all wiped out due to huge incompetence and lack of capital. So I think we have now had a real-life proving that electricity supply is a market that needs scale and resources.

Prices and tariffs are all pretty much the same because the recent large price increase has essentially broken the free market, and for the time being we're in a government-run monopoly. Hopefully in time prices will come down, or at worst be long enough established at the new levels, that a freeish market can be reestablished.

I'm not sure how much need for tariff innovation there is, but hopefully in time there'll be more scope for innovation.

You can still change - it's just harder. We moved to Octopus ~3 weeks ago.
They are still innovating: e.g. a time-of-use tarriff which is good for people with cars and big batteries. Get all your leccy between midnight and 4am or from solar because it's very expensive the rest of the time. And I think they still have the raw wholesale (but capped) tariff but it's not very popular at the moment.

I'd love a low/no standing charge as we use no gas and not much electricity (1500kWh/yr).

Posted By: WillInAberdeenThere seems to be agreement that switching to renewable generation means that a chunk of consumption will need to move to windy sunny days, especially electric car chargers and heating

Those don't seem very likely examples of movable demand. I might be willing to charge my car overnight (I do) but I can't wait for it to be windy before I go for a drive. Ditto for heating, even in my well-insulated house I run the heating overnight most days in winter, unless it was very sunny. Buffering space heating until the next windy day doesn't feel even remotely realistic.

What I think we need is distributed generation, over a large enough area that peaks and troughs in generation tend to even out. Plus a lot of storage, in whatever form turns out to be best.

edit: just to add one possibility: https://suncable.energy/connecting-asia-one-region-one-grid-sun-cable-research-paper-october-2021/

As to tariffs, are there many potential customers for something like Agile that haven't already got it? And I wouldn't expect there to be much tariff experimentation until free-ish market conditions are restored. I think standing charges are down to the regulatory environment more than anything else, sadly.

Posted By: WillInAberdeenAs we discussed, many/most new EVs will go for a fortnight of UK average driving distance on a single charge. So if it's forecast to be windy in a couple of days from now, most people could easily skip charging today, and wait until then.

Well they could, but then they'd be taking the risk that the forecast wasn't correct, or would the supplier supply 'cheap rate' electricity because it had been forecast rather than was actually available?

Likewise there are notable examples on here of people choosing which hours of the day to heat their house (naming nobody!). The best time they could have chosen today is 2230*, before the wind drops later on tonight. But who knew that and adjusted their heating to 2230? Did their energy co tell them, or even adjust it for them remotely? Would they have got a cheaper rate if they had?

But there's quite a chain of technology there. It requires the user not only to have signed up to a particular tariff from a particular supplier, but also to have bought and fitted whatever specific control gear is required by that supplier to allow said control. It has to be the supplier that does it automatically, really I think, to account for the unreliability of forecasts as before, plus the hassle a customer would have of resetting timers every day. Not many people would sign up for that. So is there really a ready-for-market system out there that a supplier could implement and achieve a sufficient number of customers signing up?

(Aside - did everyone hear that all the internet cables to Shetland were cut off last week, allegedly by trawlers from a certain hostile nation. I'm rapidly going off the idea of relying on underwater HVDC!)

Yes and FUD. The Grauniad said "the outage was due to accidental damage to the cable by a UK-registered trawler", which I gather was from an MOD source. Personally, I'd rather see trawling and dredging by fishermen banned rather than stopping laying cables.

As an aside on an aside I just did a search for "hvdc cable trawler protection" (without the quotes) and was surprised that almost all the results are for PDFs. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC97720/ld-na-27527-en-n.pdf seems to be a good summary. It appears the world's longest is https://northsealink.com/ "The cable became operational on 1 October 2021"

WiA

Because the vast majority of uk homes epare not built or retrofitted to be able to function on such a basis. The ratio of homes heated by gas/electricity alone is a large barrier let alone homes able to retain heat long enough to negate additional heating being required between the optimal supply periods. You’d also have to deal with consumer behaviours, which whilst energy is being subsidised is unlikely to change.
Legislation is the only way of forcing change, but there is still no certainty on what may or may not finally be agreed in respect of energy efficiency in the private rented sector ( given the numbers of landlords exiting the market and costs of upgrading property it would not be a total surprise to see the proposals downgraded or put on hold) next would most likely be social housing, but that would mean huge grants to organisations who’ve hardly a good record in getting value for money. Then if such taxpayer largesse is doled out there’ll be the political backlash from taxpayers who’d be effectively funding the improvements but are unable to afford to improve their own homes.
Until such time as there’s a sufficiently large customer base there’s little incentive for the suppliers to invest in the ability to help manage peoples energy use.

Posted By: WillInAberdeenOn the plus side, there are still apparently 3.5million legacy E7 meters, those homes must have some flexibility to power their heat or DHW at different times of day.

Well, we've already adjusted our systems to use as much E7 as possible, so I'm not sure what else we could do?

Plus some previously-E7 homes must already have switched to smartmeters. That's a large potential customer base for even a risk-averse Big Six co to market itself to.

Well yes, but I haven't been tempted to get a smart meter or by any of Octopus's other tariffs yet. E7 seems a sensible option for a fairly simple life.