PV Feed In Tariff

Speaking of the free market

Are they raising the feed in tariff as well 😏

Pinergy's unit costs are eye watering.

The day unit is roughly three times their FIT. And that's before the price increase. I'd stay clear.

How will the winter months pan out though?

Can you charge your batteries at a cheap rate? If not winter will be very expensive.

Edit. I did rough maths with Pinergy's unit prices and my bill would jump three to four fold in the winter months, and that's charging the battery at night rate which is 30c!

If it were me, I would definitely be leaving them in October when the solar starts to dry up, and breaking the contract. Only costs €50 to break.

I noticed you had good few posts where you stated your view against them and understandably in your case. But like I said with my posts this doesn't suit everyone but does for me and would for others BUT only where you had large solar array and large battery storage. In my case 10kwp and 20kw storage.

From Feb in I'm self sufficient up until late November. Between late November and February I charge using night rate which is 5c per kWh fixed for the term of the contract. 12kwh(average used in winter) X 0.5c = 60c for electricity each day. This is discounting the fact that last December on average had just over 5kwh generated per day in worst month of December to supplement this. Their standing charge is 54c a day so 31 days x 54c = 16.74

Again these are average figures from last December and may be slightly higher or lower usage. But roughly would be 16.74 + 18.60 which equates to € 35.34 for the worst month of December.

But again will state that this is not for everyone but for those with decent storage PV combination they are the cheapest standing charge with a cheap night charge window.

To add to this I exported just over 1000kwh for the month of June and July since I joined them and already have amassed €139 euro fit payment due from them with this month and next month's export yet to come which should be decent amount too. Had I been with them since Feb 15th when fit payment is backdated to where I have exported 2138 kWh then I would have been due €288 up until this month so next year should make plan even more value for me. This is paid in January so will allow I expect for winter months to be completely free I would hope barring disaster like solar going down for some reason.

Winter will be the true test but going by my bord gais usage last winter and the previous two I don't see why the usage will be any different this year. For balance and clarity too though I would state that this is not worth doing for a good portion of pv users as just want to make sure there is an even argument for both sides 👍

That email also got me thinking about the ethos behind the smart meter and how this is a little bit counter to the D/N tariff. To be clear, I'm on a D/N myself but I generally like the idea of smart meters albeit that the tariffs in existence are pants at the moment. Hopefully that will change. It's worth stating the two of the main goals that smart meters are effectively trying to achieve is.....

1. Reduce peak time usage by making things pricey from 5-7pm
2. Try and get people to migrate loads to night time

D/N tariffs don't really "buy into" that #1 above. There is no fiscal discouragement for me to run the tumble dryer at 5:30pm as opposed to 11am. Granted there is an advantage to fire it up at night, but really they are trying to curb the 5-7pm so that they don't have to build more power stations and that's why I think D/N aren't (or probably never will) be available with smart meters.

Yeah, maybe I'm wrong (I'd be happy if so)

Yeah, I'll all for the smart meters forcing us to be smarter when we use the grid so carbon is lowest and helps the overall cost to run the network (as they won't need likes of inefficient coal plants - which should feed back into energy prices). I think that's a responsible to give consumers the choice of when to use power. Ok, we all need to cook and that can be between 5-7pm. Same for showering in the morning if that peak time comes in. But I don't need to turn on my other heavy loads then - they can wait. So once the prices are reasonable, I'm in favour of it.

I mainly got solar for the environmental impact for our family - so I personally want to take power from the grid at the lowest carbon creation point I can (which is middle of the night). And of course reducing my bills is a huge no. 2 to that

Ohh 100% for sure Paul. I'm a software engineer by profession and the implementation of what you say above is trivial to do - but D/N tariffs are against the whole premise of why I think they are introducing smart meters, that being to have those peak rates and fiscally incentivize people to move loads away from those peak times.

That's the real objective and it was in the Eirgrid yearly statement I think I read that they expect that when smart meters are fully introduced and working.....it will lower the overall peak loading requirement by 4-5% (that's a lot when you consider it)

Might be going a little too far off topic of Feed-in-Tariffs, but it's not the suppliers who's driving the rollout of smart meters it's Eirgrid (via ESB). Replacing 2.4million meters at no (direct) cost to the consumer isn't cheap. Yeah, before someone says it....sure we all might be paying for the meter in increases bills/rates, but nahh.....as much as I'd like to say it's a bit of profiteering, in fairness it's probably genuinely a legitimate plan in reducing the need to build more power stations.

I just wish there was a bit more "transparency" and less of the cloak-n-dagger nonsense. It's great that you have these (better than I thought we'd get) FIT payments of €0.13-0.14, but they obfuscate the amount you actually pay with standing charges, reductions for direct debit, joining bonuses, etc etc etc to the point that people with excel spreadsheet skills are having trouble to work out what you actually pay.

Think about that for a second. You have to sit down with Excel, or use Bonkers.ie to figure out what your bill might be. That's nuts lads.

@bullit_dodger - some of the plans are nuts indeed and there really shouldn't be any standing charges. I just signed up with a gas plan. If I use less than 1100kWh of gas equivalent in the year, my total bill for the year will be zero. Including standing charges. Because of a €220 cashback welcome bonus. Nuts.

Now obviously 1100kWh of gas equivalent is tiny. But might be attainable for me as I have a large solar thermal array for heating water (and where it is short I use electric water heating) and I use electric space heating. I do have a gas hob and gas fireplace, but they don't use all that much

Excellent post @paulbok and I couldn't agree more. We will all have to prepare for real time pricing and our politicians will just have to bite the bullet on that and disregard the pledges from salon socialists "oh think about the elderly - they don't know it will cost them €0.10 to boil a kettle at 7PM". Yes it will at €3 per kWh and so be it.

And yeah, this is already common in the US - a few years ago during an extreme heatwave with huge shortages of electricity in Texas, the rate temporarily went up to USD10 per kWh. Bring it on. If that's the real cost (plus margin), we will have to pay it.

If anything, that will give us all a huge incentive to generate more electricity from renewables and state and micro level and to support the grid with batteries and V2G...

It's a great example of how not to do it.

I think Texas is a great example of why you need a strong regulator for utilities, there was actually another cold spell there in 2011 I think, and all the power plants were told they need to be winter ready

Of course ERCOT in Texas has about as much enforcement power as an old lady waving her handbag, so all the energy companies ignored it. Then fast forward to 2021 and to nobody's surprise, except ever power company in Texas, a blizzard rolls through and every power plant freezes and stops operating

Unusual comparison alright!

Night Boost EI Smart rate is identical to normal day/night but have a cheaper 2 hour window from 2am to 4am, standing charge is same as well.

https://www.electricireland.ie/switch/new-customer/price-plans?priceType=E