Monthly Archives: February 2021

Making smart choices – smart tariff smart comparison

Regular readers will know that I’m into smart electricity tariffs as a means to save money and deliver a greener lower carbon electricity grid. In the last 12 months we’ve paid an average 7.2 p/kWh for electricity when we weren’t using our own from our solar panels. However you’ll never find these tariffs on price comparison sites who will happily ignore smart tariffs while earning commission by switching you to a standard flat rate or Economy 7 tariff that makes little difference to your costs versus what you may already have been paying. I’ve thus been pleased to support a project to develop a tool to help choose between these smart tariffs which are completely ignored by the existing switching services and price comparison sites and apps.

The project is now testing its solution.

My usage and costs versus nearest rival tariff.

The system under final testing works in a completely different manner to the regular services. Rather than ask a few questions about consumption or costs, the new tool asks about smart meter details and then loads a year’s data indirectly from your smart meter. It thus knows precisely what electricity you consumed over the prior 12 months. The tool also asks about your flexibility to shift load to cheaper times in fairly simple percentage terms and then shows a range of tariffs (currently for testing real tariffs with false names) and their average monthly costs. You can overlay the costs of each alternative tariff in turn over your existing costs. You can see that, even with maximum flexibility, I’d have paid an extra £116 annually on the nearest tariff to my existing tariff.

You can find the demonstration system here https://smarttariffsmartcomparison.org/