Agile Octopus is a product from the UK energy supplier Octopus which we signed up for in December 2023. Since it is now January 2025, that means we have a full year of data and I thought it might be useful to write up our experience.
With Agile, your electricity price changes every 30 minutes based on the current wholesale price of electricity in your area. Your gas stays at a fixed price, whatever the current fixed rate tariff they have is. You need to have a smart meter installed, which did take some back and forth because the one that came with our house was not compatible, but generally we found that Octopus provided good support and did fix the problems we had, even if it took a couple of months (while Scottish Power ignored me for the previous 5 years...).
Around 4pm every day, they release the rates for the next 24 hours. We use an app called Octopus Compare which gives us a nice graph of what these rates are going to be. I also use Home Assistant Octopus integration to show the current and next electricity price on our kitchen dashboard screen (more about that another time).
This allows us to quickly check what the price is going to be and decide whether or not it is a good time to switch on the dishwasher or tumble dryer and generally move our electricity usage to times when it is going to be cheaper. We cannot shift everything since both my wife and I work from home, but we can at least make the effort.
We also have an electric car, so being able to charge that during the night or weekends when the price is very low has definitely made a big difference.
The rates can vary wildly from day to day, but we have found that over the past year the average rate is still below the current best fixed tariff they (or anyone else in the UK) offers. There are times when the kWh price is less than zero, meaning they are paying us to use electricity. And there are times (although this has only happened twice) when the price is £1 per kWh, which is the highest it can be. At these times we definitely do not charge the car.
In Scotland 90% of our electricity comes from renewable sources, mostly wind. We are surrounded by hills and those hills are covered in wind turbines. So what we have noticed (and I wonder if this is true in other parts of the UK) is that when it is windy, our electricity the next day will be cheap. When it is not windy (like now, when it is just frozen outside, but otherwise very calm) our electricity price can be very high. Thankfully, Scotland is pretty windy.
If I do a comparison of our Agile Octopus cost versus the alternative 12M Fixed Cost, across the whole year our electricity costs have been 22% less than what they would have been.
Use my link to sign up to Octopus if you're looking to switch energy supplier.