@editor 

Cross border or cross-entity tax optimisation is unfortunately a well established practice and some companies have whole departments dedicated to it.  Starbucks, for example, allegedly (and https://londondaily.com/starbucks-pays-just-5m-uk-corporation-tax-on-95m-gross-profit) pays its entity in Switzerland vast amounts to source coffee beans which (also allegedly) never even pass through that well known coffer producing company.

This, of course, seriously dilutes the autonomy of the nation state which, ultimately, is our only defence against authoritarian rule by global oligarchs.

There some international discussions which aim to restrict this, but of course some countries benefit. 

@jamespa Tax evasion is illegal - Tax Avoidance is an art form available to those with money. Toodles.

My take on the OVO Heat Pump Plus tariff being cancelled.

@mars

I think your commentary is very fair and balanced.  I do get that suppliers are genuinely experimenting with tariffs to find out what customer behaviours they drive, but I also, like you, believe that they should be transparent and absolutely should not launch any tariffs which they know are an unsustainable  loss leader unless they make it clear that this is what they are doing. 

Personally I was always sceptical about the long term sustainability of Heat Pump Plus, unless they planned to layer on some control of the heat pump, and have said so on several occasions on this forum.  I think we now know that they either didn't plan to do that, or decided not to.  So when they launched it did they know that it would prove unsustainable.  And even if they didn't then how soon did this become clear.  They are giving just 2 months notice of its discontinuation, if they had extended the notice until the end of the heating season, say 1st or 15th April, that might have been a bit more reasonable!

Of course as you say the underlying problem is the high price of electricity - although its interesting to note that gas in France and Germany appears to be roughly twice the price of that in the UK (with electricity just slightly cheaper), so it could be that the underlying problem is actually the cheap price of gas, which historically is perhaps why our houses have poorly designed central heating systems and lousy insulation!

Posted by: @jamespa

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They are giving just 2 months notice of its discontinuation, if they had extended the notice until the end of the heating season, say 1st or 15th April, that might have been a bit more reasonable!

Absolutely! Fully agree. And they gave just 5 and bit weeks notice. Also had a rather interesting call from OVO last night on the subject, and am expecting a call back today to answer questions on why they stopped it. Given it's 13:30, I'm not convinced they'll call, but let's see.

Posted by: @jamespa

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Of course as you say the underlying problem is the high price of electricity ...

I agree, the consumer is not being properly represented and some of this tech smells of using the country as a test bed.. 

Hopefully the excesses of the past years will result in less appetite for this experimentation. Prototypes belong in the lab and deployment after testing. Having been badly burnt with the EV charger, my tolerance is gone.. 

Posted by: @jamespa

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 our houses have poorly designed central heating systems and lousy insulation!

When prioritising keeping the character and tradition, less is within reach. 

Posted by: @editor

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I’ve just learned that OVO Energy, the company we pay our bills to, has been paying tens of millions of pounds every year in licensing fees. That’s not unusual for a big brand, but here’s the catch: the money is paid to another company called OVO Group Ltd for the right to use the “OVO” name and for so-called “management services.” The thing is, both OVO Energy and OVO Group Ltd are ultimately owned by the same person, Stephen Fitzpatrick.

I think it's worthwhile looking beyond the OVO Group to see the wider issue.

At heart, Stephen Fitzpatrick is an innovator and entrepreneur.
He sees future technological opportunities in a different way to most of us, and puts money and effort into achieving those products.

For the past decade, his main focus has been Vertical Aerospace, which has developed a prototype electric taxi with eight rotors, four of which rotate to provide forwards motion.
It's effectively a people-carrying drone, created in the UK (Gloucester Airport) well before current drone-based technology.

OVO Energy, Kaluza and Indra Renewable Technologies have sprung from Stephen's investment. The first two formed directly from his own work, and Indra produced the CHAdEMO V2G charger when Stephen backed its CEO, Mike Schooling.

Unlike Greg at Octopus, who remains full-time hands-on at his energy company, Stephen handed on the reins of OVO Energy and Kaluza.
Those companies have licensing agreements in place to benefit OVO Group, where Stephen remained as the CEO.

The downside of being such a visionary is that Stephen is British.

When Vertical Aerospace required more funding, the City of London was nowhere to be seen.
Inevitably it was dollar investment from the other side of the Atlantic which acquired 80% of the company.
Stephen resigned as a director in Jan'25.

There is now massive investment in drone technology here in UK.

It's come about as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and is centred on autonomous transport, in the air, on the sea and below the waves.
Money is pouring into Plymouth where the development effort is concentrated.
There's a 8000km² offshore test area with its own air-traffic control, where prototypes can be tested prior to gaining air certification.

Stephen was a decade too early...
... and concentrating on passenger-based flight, which suffers from an enormous burdon of testing and certification.

If he'd been able to access the present levels of MOD financial support, then the outcome would be very different,
and it would be UK military might which deters Russian forces.

@transparent 

Thanks, this helps. Could it be that Stephen's mindset has been to use renewables and so Ovo to fund his dream of Vertical Aerospace?

Greg seems to be more interested in doing what it takes to push decarbonisation And given the values embedded in Octopus, make it affordable, collaborating with nearest neighbours etc. Octopus is present in many markets, not just the anglo saxon world. 

@majordennisbloodnok 

This may be a better thread to discuss the latest tariffs and loss of control of devices. For clarity, I am continuing a discussion that was started in another post...

Essentially I changed to the Octopus INTELLI-FIX-12M-25-08-29 EV tariff, that is 12 months with 7p/kwh for 6 fixed hours overnight. 

Octopus mentions you need to provide them with API access to drive your EV charger and your car (well, the charging..). In my case, they seemed to be happy enough to only have access to the car API. 

This tariff has been working very well, my inverter is powerful enough to top up the battery overnight and run all needs for a day an a half. We very rarely need to charge the car during the day. 

A little niggle today, I wanted to top up the car using the home battery for a longer journey, started at 5pm... I had a few iterations investigating why Ohme appeared to dictate 10 mins max charging was enough. Eventually I realised the car itself had been set to only charge at 3:30 (so even the granny charger I tried was worthless). The end result: a more relaxed journey switching to the old diesel... No stress searching where to top up the EV at the destination.

Still, as the saying goes, an exception confirms the rule. Which is, that the tariff works very well for me as a consumer.

And it should work even better when I get going with SEG export!

Worth adding that, for this tariff, the Octopus app has some decent UI and controls. 

In general, when taking up a device specific tariff, your supplier's app may become another point to control use of power. 

I eventually switched to Octopus Intelligent go after having installed a heat pump and subsequently an EV charger (on top of my solar panels and battery - described all in other threads...). I can now tell how much Octopus billed me since August 14 (rolling drums): £389.94

Now, all things considered in terms of gross and fine-grained optimisation of my whole system I think this can be certainly improved.

The last available annual cost estimate they made before the installation was

£257.41 a year for electricity
£488.54 a year for gas

I would love to hear the experience other people are having with such an integrated system (HP, PV+battery, EV).

I hope this is the right thread for it!

Cheers,

E

@eliuccio Those are some good results.

We have a similar integrated system with an EV, PV, batteries and a heat pump. We have the EV for a couple of years, and installed the PV and batteries in summer 2024. But, the heat pump.was installed only in January 2025 and moved to Octopus immediately after.

We recently completed the first full year with Octopus. Initially we were on Octopus Cosy until mid April 2025 when we moved to Octopus Go. The battery capacity was doubled in May 2025, and for the full year Octopus billed us £746 including standing charges for gas and electricity. We still use gas for cooking, for which we used 366 kWh of gas for the year. It's hard to compare last year with before these changes, but I would say we are saving nearly £2300 annually including the car. But, if we look at just gas and electricity, we are probably saving around .£1300. Purely on financial returns alone, electrifying transport and heating plus installing PV and batteries has been the best option for us.