Have you seen their rates though ?. From mid-2021 onwards anyone on 'Agile' is paying the capped maximum of 35p/unit for a significant part of the day and even during 'quiet' periods the rate rarely gets down to the current capped SVR rate. The only time it went really low was last Saturday when we had the wrong sort of wind from the North east and the Agile rate went negative, but only for about an hour from what I can see.
What did the paper advise in 1947 when it was *really* cold ?
I'm glad to say that I managed to fix my rate at 26.something p/unit, but that is still a shock to the system, as I was paying around 14 p/unit until the company I was with collapsed :(
Agile is unhedged, so it tracks the spot market price. The market price is crazy-high at the moment (a lot more than the Ofgem price cap), so Agile bumps into its own inbuilt price cap.
Currently the retail market is super distorted by the Ofgem price cap and everyone is losing money. That's not a situation that can continue indefinitely.
That doesn't mean you couldn't run that kind of tariff with some degree of hedging: the troughs wouldn't be as deep but the peaks wouldn't be as high. As long as it adds up to breakeven that would work out.
I take the point that a lot of domestic loads aren't feasibly shiftable, but some large loads like heating and charging may be more so in future, and it may be more economic to have your own house battery. It would still need some smoothing so the peaks aren't unaffordable during long periods of no wind or solar.
Theo
The price cap is a form of hedging. It has protected the 15 million on SVR from being overcharged in order to subsidise the switchers. The latter have now lost their advantage, which was heavily in their favour before the price cap started.
At the end of the day hedging is just another version of Peter robbing Paul. Someone's gain from hedging is someone else's loss.
no interest in games of thrones....sounds stupid anyway
never seen star wars either
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