Posted by: @jamespa

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Someone who used to work in BP finance told me just a few weeks ago that they lose money on forecourt sales.  I don't know if it's true, but if it is it will be by design

It has always been the case that oil companies make very little margin in fuel sales. The main job of fuel is to draw people into the shop since the markup on what they sell there is far higher.

I struggle to accept that the likes of BP or She’ll are making their huge profits on the back of upselling a mars bar or king skins to the local pot heads! If so, they wouldn’t have introduced payment at the pump. 

Posted by: @papahuhu

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I struggle to accept that the likes of BP or She’ll are making their huge profits on the back of upselling a mars bar or king skins to the local pot heads! If so, they wouldn’t have introduced payment at the pump. 

Profits are made upstream, in discovery and pumping the stuff out of the ground. The further downstream you go, the lower the profits get (even oil refineries struggle to make a profit, hence the dwindling number of them in the UK). I have no clue why oil majors even bother with service stations, other than maybe product placement / advertising. Even then, I'm not sure why an oil major would be concerned with advertising - would you stop buying petroleum based products if Shell or BP stopped advertising tomorrow?

I've known a couple people who have run service stations, and the profit on fuel is almost non-existent, especially where they are trying to price match against others who are clearly able to view it as a loss leader (supermarkets), whereas people will pick up a £1 Mars bar whilst waiting in the queue to pay (which probably seems insignificant when handing over £80 for the fuel). Same thing with pubs - beer is the loss leader, penny a pint product, that gets people through the doors and then they buy crisps, or a meal, or maybe and orange juice or one of those fancy fruity ciders in a bottle.

Posted by: @jamespa

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Someone who used to work in BP finance told me just a few weeks ago that they lose money on forecourt sales.  I don't know if it's true, but if it is it will be by design.

yes and no I think. Franchising does not count, right? 😉

the public thinks its BP employees..

Posted by: @old_scientist

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Posted by: @papahuhu

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I struggle to accept that the likes of BP or She’ll are making their huge profits on the back of upselling a mars bar or king skins to the local pot heads! If so, they wouldn’t have introduced payment at the pump. 

...I have no clue why oil majors even bother with service stations, other than maybe product placement / advertising. Even then, I'm not sure why an oil major would be concerned with advertising - would you stop buying petroleum based products if Shell or BP stopped advertising tomorrow?

...

That's largely, I believe, because all the others are doing it. If BP stopped running or franchising service stations, those stations would be adopted by a competitor and the fuel sold there would not be from BP. Advertising to the oil giants is just a cost, but they're not promoting themselves; they're just avoiding being squeezed out.

You can see the same effect when a ban came into effect on advertising for tobacco products; the tobacco companies actually made a bigger profit since they didn't have to spend on marketing and so that budget became pure profit. Market share, however, didn't change since the ban was industry-wide.

Posted by: @old_scientist

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...

I've known a couple people who have run service stations, and the profit on fuel is almost non-existent, especially where they are trying to price match against others who are clearly able to view it as a loss leader (supermarkets), whereas people will pick up a £1 Mars bar whilst waiting in the queue to pay (which probably seems insignificant when handing over £80 for the fuel). Same thing with pubs - beer is the loss leader, penny a pint product, that gets people through the doors and then they buy crisps, or a meal, or maybe and orange juice or one of those fancy fruity ciders in a bottle.

Absolutely. With fuel, people don't actually want to buy it; it's a distress purchase. They will happily drive a few miles more to somewhere that sells it cheaper (or fill up earlier if they see a good price whilst out driving), so any attempt to get a higher profit from fuel simply leads to fewer customers. Once those customers are in the shop, however, the markup on other products is far higher. That Mars bar being discussed can be bought wholesale for under 30p but seems to be retailing normally at around £1.20, so don't underestimate the profit from the shop IF they can get the customer on the forecourt in the first place.

@old_scientist Is flux working out ok for you? I’m finding that for an average hazy  summers day, let’s say 40kWh, I’m getting about a daily 50% uptick in export revenue compared to octopus outgoing. Just £4.80 on outgoing, but £7.50 on flux, that’s a big difference over a summer.

The PW AI isn’t so intelligent, its been about a week and it still hasn’t learnt to incorporate all the variable to truly maximise my output. It’s costing me about 10 kWh a day, by it not using a strategy to mitigate for my export limit. Maybe AI won’t be trying to kill me just yet. 

Ive just had a conversation with Chat GPT and made the decision to sign up for Octopus Charge Pack. My Huawei battery isnt easy to automate and I would have to go down the HA route if I wanted to take advantage of flexible charging/discharging. It reassured me that I would still get the 12p/kWh export in addition to a minimum of £12 / month with the possibility of more. Ill monitor it and report back 🙂

@bontwoody Thank you, that will be very intesting; my Powerwall kit is not yet compatible with Charge Pack but it is something I am considering once it is. Rewards, Toodles.

@toodles The fact that my Huawei was, was the real attraction for me 🙂 Its not compatible with Axle 🙁

Posted by: @papahuhu

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@old_scientist Is flux working out ok for you? I’m finding that for an average hazy  summers day, let’s say 40kWh, I’m getting about a daily 50% uptick in export revenue compared to octopus outgoing. Just £4.80 on outgoing, but £7.50 on flux, that’s a big difference over a summer.

The PW AI isn’t so intelligent, its been about a week and it still hasn’t learnt to incorporate all the variable to truly maximise my output. It’s costing me about 10 kWh a day, by it not using a strategy to mitigate for my export limit. Maybe AI won’t be trying to kill me just yet. 

@papahuhu unfortunately I'm still stuck on Octopus Outgoing for export with Flux import, so still in no-mans-land. I've spoken with an acquaintance who has quite a bit of experience supporting Tesla/Octopus customers, and he said in his experience it's about 50:50 on convincing Octopus to backdate the export to Flux.

So for now, I've switched back to running in self-consumption mode to be safe (i.e, not importing anything at Flux prices, but not optimising export either).

Apart from - Octopus Savings Sessions the last few evenings. I was slow to the party on this as Octopus not only pay you for using (importing) less electricity than you normally import (zero for me, as I'm self sufficient), they will also pay if you export more than you normally export. For example, last night they were paying 51.9p for any additional export between 7:30-8:30pm in addition to your standard export rate, so last night I dumped the battery in that 1h window to maximise export. They calculate your baseline usage (or export) over the last 10 weekdays (or 2 weekends) and then pay you for the difference.

So whilst I'm waiting for the transition to Flux Export to complete, I've been filling my boots on the Octopus Savings sessions. There's another one tonight 6:30-7:30pm, but it's only paying an additional 13.5p tonight.

These Savings Sessions work really well with regular Octopus Outgoing, because they are normally at peak rate time (6pm onwards) and under normal circumstances you would not normally have exported much during those times so your baseline export will be low allowing you to fully benefit from dumping the battery.

Thanks @old_scientist That's good to know, as it wasn't obvious from their emails. I didn't bother joining in the savings sessions as we don't touch the grid during peak hours, so thought what's the point. If they pay more for export, I would happily dump more to the grid, as our batteries don't fall below 90% in the summer months. Given the orientation of our PV array, we are exporting like 3.5 kWh per hour these days from 1 pm to 7 pm, so wouldn't hurt to take from the batteries too.

Posted by: @old_scientist

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they will also pay if you export more than you normally export.

Posted by: @papahuhu

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@old_scientist Is flux working out ok for you? I’m finding that for an average hazy  summers day, let’s say 40kWh, I’m getting about a daily 50% uptick in export revenue compared to octopus outgoing. Just £4.80 on outgoing, but £7.50 on flux, that’s a big difference over a summer.

The PW AI isn’t so intelligent, its been about a week and it still hasn’t learnt to incorporate all the variable to truly maximise my output. It’s costing me about 10 kWh a day, by it not using a strategy to mitigate for my export limit. Maybe AI won’t be trying to kill me just yet. 

@papahuhu with regard to the Tesla AI, I came up with the strategy of switching to ToU mode at 4pm (with 0% reserve if you're happy with that), allow the battery to completely dump at 29.5p (in my region) and then at 7pm switch back to self-powered mode during which it can just directly pull in from the grid at 25p for overnight consumption, at less than you exported for (and no conversion losses) and 15p between 2-5pm, and then the following morning you will self consume 10p solar and recharge the battery with the excess through to export time at 4pm again.

The only improvement I could make to that very simple model is to slightly charge the battery on cheap overnight rate (2-5am) to avoid 25p import from 5am until the sun comes up at 6am, but for us that's maybe 300W costing us less than 10p/kWh after conversion losses, so maybe saving 3p, which is not worth the risk of handing control over to ToU and Tesla messing it up IMHO. Of course this may not work for your usage patterns so YMMV, and assumes there is enough solar each day to cover your usage and/or recharge the battery (but even if there is not, you are still importing at 25p but exporting at 29p so it's not worth saving battery for later usage, better to empty it at 29p)