@wantobegreen - how much of your question relates to the capital cost as opposed to the running costs?

Have you read this topic about Business Case for a Battery.
Page-1 answers a lot of your questions because we discuss whether the way for storage to become viable is to take the route of DIY assembly.

However, I must emphasise what @lucia is saying at the top of this discussion.
She's highlighted articles from the FT in which the journalist has picked up proposals for future energy strategy in Britain.

The way in which energy is to be offered to us consumers is set to change radically.

NESO wants National Grid Electricity Transmission and the DNOs to spend at least £40bn on infrastructure upgrades in addition to the alternative possibility of limiting demand during peak periods. The costs involved are mind boggling... and the money has to come from us lot.

That's going to affect how we view investing in battery storage, especially if that's required to run heat-pumps.

BTW, I currently have 56kWh of LiFePO4 battery.

@wanttobegreen sure, 2x6.5kW. Which gives a useable storage capacity of about 12kW. For the majority of the winter we can charge 9kW into the batteries at 3kWh max charge power in the 3hr low rate periods, x2 per day = 18kW with a further 3rd low rate period of 2hrs providing 6kW more that we don't currently need. Round trip losses are about 10%.

So per day we have up to 24kW of low rate battery storage with Cosy, which will power the house from batteries for the vast majority of the heating season. We use the ASHP from 4am to 9pm.

It's only kept on overnight in exceptionally cold weather, when we'll use the 3rd low rate charging period. The 10kW ASHP draws anything from 700W to 3000W depending on heating load and ambient temperature. In the coldest weather we can consume 40 or 50kWh a day, including a fair chunk of electricity at standard rate periods, but that's the exception, perhaps for 3 or 4 weeks of the heating season, and not the norm.

I have an ASHP, solar and (only) 5.2kWh of battery storage. Last year I was on Cosy when it came out, then switched to Flux, then back to Cosy in Autumn. This year I have been on Cosy all year as it didn't seem worth it to switch to Flux with the lower export prices when I had the reliable 15p standard export rate.

Even with this modest amount of battery storage compared to Ally and Transparent it allows us to run the house mostly on the cheapest Cosy rate (with a bit of scheduling), which was around 10p until October and now it is 11p. Of course in summer the solar covers everything and gives us some credit on the account going into winter. A caveat though is that we still cook with gas until we can afford a new kitchen, then I'll be keen to get more battery storage and probably a newer inverter that can output more than 3.6kW and charge/discharge more than 2.5kW on the batteries. 

I haven't done Sept and Oct's numbers, but at the end of August my solar/battery system had saved us over £3000 in a little over 2 years and it cost around £7500.

This is the document which seems to inspire the article https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download all 85pages of it. I’ve not found any OBR projections of changes to green levies on the latest OBR report so the journalist may have other sources

There's a major difference between the NESO proposals in the snippet just posted by @judith  and the DSR proposals I referred to here, one page back.

Whilst I haven't yet read all 85 pages, I have attended the seminars hosted by the three major National Grid companies in the run up to the Energy Act becoming law in Nov'23.
The main platform speakers at those briefings were technical managers who I now know to be the ones most closely associated with the formation of NESO and the future RESPs.

The Nat.Grid / NESO strategies are based on the mechanisms already available from ToU Tariffs. They've looked at the responses to price signals by us consumers and concluded that ToU pricing periods can be used effectively to control demand.

But suppose you're not Octopus, but instead another major Supplier who hasn't bothered to offer ToU tariffs and learn how they might work.
Perhaps you have a Billing System which complies with the basic Ofgem licence requirements, but you've invested naff all in code which allows you to handle Smart Appliances.
What if your Board is comprised mainly of accountants who receive share-options and receive dividends, rather than having any great depth of technical understanding?

You'd look at NESO's strategy and realise that next year's dividends are going to need diverting into a substantial software development exercise.
Oh dear.

So you raise the issue at your next meeting with Ofgem and DESNZ.
You complain how unfair it is that NESO is so obviously biassed in favour of certain other rival suppliers.
And you suggest an alternative strategy based on control of in-home devices by third-parties.

Civil servants like the word 'control'.
Moreover that sounds like a lot of work...
which means more staff...
and lots of committees.

Thus we now have a Government Consultation for DSR, based not on price points within ToU tariffs, but instead a massive database which holds information on all consumers and sends commands into their homes across the internet.

True, the Consultation does have 12 questions about ToU Tariffs at the end.
But the 58 questions on DSR of ESAs which start the consultation are more detailed, showing where the effort has been put in since the original 2022 consultation.

Moreover the ToU explanatory notes cast doubt on the use of all those Smart Meters which we've just spent years installing at a cost of £? billion.
After all, they're just 'so 2014' don't you think?

@judith

I’ve not found any OBR projections of changes to green levies on the latest OBR report so the journalist may have other sources.

It is scattered through various charts in the OBR Autumn Budget report. And in a supplemental update from the March projections - caused by the increase in the prices for Contracts For Difference they were all crowing about. [🙄]

Give thanks for FT journalists prepared to crunch the numbers. I admit it makes my eyes glaze over until I get really pissed off then I'm motivated... 

@transparent makes several very good points in his post. Let’s imagine Another Major Supplier (AMS) who is loosing market share and as he so very well illustrates their board wishes to keep dividends high. So AMS might also indicate to government that their policy is not being impartial and hence might be subject to judicial review which leads to much awkwardness, government cost and delay.
There is a revolving door between upper levels of industry, civil service and the cabinet thus decision makers may consider their next role of a non-executive directorship or two. So maybe the decision makers have already moved? Given we have ~4+years of the present government there may be 2 years before that next role becomes part of the thinking 🤔 

But AMS also needs a strong team of software engineers to implement controls if control is the route forward and a strong and experienced standards negotiation team to make sure the standard isn’t the de-facto one already used by a more innovative supplier or AMS will be at a further disadvantage. Tomato Energy shows there’s further scope for challenger suppliers in the market now.

@lucia commented on the scope for prices increases but the NESO report also says there is scope for decreases by the unlinking from gas once gas generation is not the marginal price setter. But there is a need for more clarity in  this concept.  Structural change in the wholesale market to constrain the marginal price mechanism or ‘keep your fingers crossed’ that the low marginal cost renewable energy becomes the price setter? There’s a big difference! Similarly setting a high carbon price to prevent gas generation being purely for export thus dominating the interconnectors and land transmission resources without any benefit to UK citizens paying for them. But that concept needs more robust testing too!

There’s a lot happening in the energy world right now. Too soon to regret purchasing an ashp but enough potential threat to learn how most efficiently use it.

Posted by: @transparent

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an alternative strategy based on control of in-home devices by third-parties.

Civil servants like the word 'control'.

Too right, and it gives me the absolute creeps! The idea that third parties - governments and/or corporates, and I don't know which is worse - should have hour by hour, perhaps even minute by minute, control inside our homes is truly Orwellian, and for once that adjective is not hyperbole. It is one thing to nudge eg by ToU tariffs, but even that is rather repellent, and is likely to discriminate, but to take control... 

And:

What about the huge amount of personal data that will get collected and potentially abused?

What about when the controls go wrong/get hacked?

What about autonomy - the idea that unless there are good reasons otherwise, then it is up to individuals to choose how they live their lives?

One of the more insidious and pernicious effects - and I for one am not sure this happened by accident - of the response to covid was to prep the masses to accept central control. Remember how close we got to covid passports? Nothing good will ever come from such tight central control. If we let it in through the back door, or rather a smart meter, then it is only a matter of time before we become the next command and control nation like China, a nation wherein “Model individuals will be commended in accordance with regulations, and extensive publicity will be conducted through the news media to create a trustworthy and glorious public opinion atmosphere.” (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2014).  

Posted by: @judith

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There’s a lot happening in the energy world right now. Too soon to regret purchasing an ashp but enough potential threat to learn how most efficiently use it.

I’ve read your posts over many weeks with interest Judith.  But can’t help thinking “a lot is happening” is a distinctly relative term in view of the urgency of the need to decarbonise. 

So 

I can’t help thinking we are a million miles away from where we need to be. 

I read recently that Sweden as a nation have 60% adoption of heat pumps whereas we are a lowly 1%. 

And now on these forums we read suggestions of the big stick approach of making electricity impossibly expensive in the future. thus possibly attempting to force adoption of energy saving technology. Meanwhile doing nothing in the UK about the “spark gap” of the gas price.

So perhaps there is a deeper meaning in the motivator that more costly electricity is a reason to invest in a heat pump. Rather than a disincentive to invest in a complex electrical heating system with unknown future costs and tedious tarrif hunting a necessary requirement. 

To a new prospective HP purchaser, with cost uncertainty and the added complexities of operation, does this really sound attractive?

Posted by: @judith

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the NESO report also says there is scope for decreases by the unlinking from gas once gas generation is not the marginal price setter. But there is a need for more clarity in  this concept.  Structural change in the wholesale market to constrain the marginal price mechanism or ‘keep your fingers crossed’ that the low marginal cost renewable energy becomes the price setter?

I think I ought to explain how the Market Half Hourly Settlement (MHHS) system works.

UK Energy Suppliers need to buy electricity.

They will already have Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with a number of renewable energy generators. For example, Vattenfall own large-scale North Sea wind-farms, and a PPA allows a Supplier to buy a chunk of that output over a number of years. The price is fixed within that (confidential) contract.

If their PPAs can't satisfy the demand from a Supplier's customers for a forthcoming half-hour period, then the deficit must be bought on the European wholesale market. Each auction closes 10-minutes before that next half-hour is due to begin.

The last 'trade' of each MHHS auction sets the price for all electricity bought in that period.
Suppliers try to buy what they require from the renewable-energy generation sites first, but a canny trader acting on behalf of a less scrupulous seller can hang on until the last moment in the hope of raising the price.

Fossil Fuel generation sellers are more likely to be active right up to the close of the auction. On a sultry overcast day there will be little solar and wind generation, so the Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants know that Suppliers offering the greener tariffs will be forced to buy their carbon-emitting electricity at higher prices.

If the final trade of the auction is between Judith's AMS and the Pembroke CCGT plant, then all previous trades will be settled at that strike price.

That's why our UK electricity gets pegged to the unfavourable wholesale gas price.

NESO's aim is to decarbonise GB's electricity supplies by 2030, twenty years ahead of the Government's Net Zero target.

If there's no fossil fuel generation left in the auction, then we will have decoupled ourselves from that wholesale gas price.

That wasn't the original policy. Government has spent a lot of time behind the scenes trying to broker a different way of handling the wholesale electricity market.
Both Kwasi Kwateng MP and Jacob Rees Mogg MP put considerable efforts in that direction when the world energy crisis erupted in early 2022 (the invasion of Ukraine by Russia).

It was the fierce resistance from vendors in the wholesale electricity market against Government-led reform which has informed NESO's current approach.

Posted by: @judith

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But AMS also needs a strong team of software engineers to implement controls if control is the route forward

Not necessarily.

The DESNZ Consultation on Delivering a Smart and Secure Energy System didn't specify that each Demand-Side Response Agent was to create their own command and control software system.

Indeed, the text suggests another alternative...
... that Government/Ofgem will create a single control database to which DSR-Agents and Suppliers can be granted access under a licence.

We sort of have such a system with DCC acting as the only portal through which Energy Suppliers and Smart Meter manufacturers can have access to out Smart Meters.
However, the Smart Meter data remains encrypted as it passes through DCC's hands.
No employee of DCC can read data from your Smart Meter, not send commands to it.
The limit of their access is when they first commission a meter when it gets installed.

But that's not a valid comparison, because the database required to operate a DSR control system will contain data derived from individual households, such as the MPAN of the meter and its location.

This becomes clearer when you read Part-3 of the SSES Consultation regarding Time-of-Use Tariffs.
In the minds of the Question-setters, the concept of 3rd-party external control of Smart Appliances (ESAs) in the home is to be linked to future ToU tariffs.

No longer is a ToU Tariff to be an isolated 'contract' put together by your preferred Energy Supplier.

@cathodray is quite right to express concerns.

Although the consultation closed at the start of June'24, there is still an email address through which you can directly communicate with the team handling this within DESNZ
SSESconsultation@energysecurity.gov.uk

If they reject communication from an individual, your MP will no doubt get through and make your concerns known!

@judith

Tomato Energy shows there’s further scope for challenger suppliers in the market now.