Finding Your Cheapest Electricity Tariff from Your Smart Meter Data

In Ireland there are more than 1.5 million smart electricity meters installed yet only a small number of us use what would be the best (i.e. cheapest) electricity tariff for us. Smart meters can mean an increase in your electricity bills, or they can mean a reduction in your electricity bills but the challenge is having to blindly choose what will probably be the wrong supplier and the wrong electricity tariff for you, from almost 60 tariffs available from a dozen energy suppliers.

You can look at the annual standing charge, you can look at the peak rate, or the day and the night rates, or you can check the % discount on offer, or you may be tempted by a welcome discount, or maybe the EV rate if you charge at home, or even the FIT rate if you have solar panels or maybe you just like that you will get entered for a draw for tickets to some event and from all that, you have to choose a tariff.

Even taking all of these factors together does not help you choose what will be the cheapest electricity tariff for you. The only way to find what is your cheapest tariff -- and it might be a smart tariff, a day/night rate or a fixed 24 hour rate -- is to use your own smart meter data.

Is it worth bothering to find the cheapest tariff ?

Hundreds of people have used our system and as of July 2024, the cheapest annual bill averaged €1,645 while the most expensive averaged €2,756. That’s a difference of more than €1,100 a year for the same household, the same energy used, just by choosing the right or the wrong tariff !

The graph below shows a sample of those users .. blue dots are their cheapest smart tariffs, orange dots are their most expensive and remember, these are from the same households.

From hundreds of users we have found that there is no energy supplier that is the cheapest for everyone so yes, it is absolutely worth shopping around, and we can do this for you.

Here's a link to a YouTube video showing how our system works and what the output and savings are for a typical user.

Below is the link to a Google form for calculating your electricity bill from your data. To use it you will need your MPRN number which you can find on your electricity bill, and a GMail email address to access the form and as a place we can email your results.

Good luck, we hope this saves you some money.

Any questions, please contact Alan Smeaton

June 2024

FAQs

Q: What do you do with our anonymised smart meter data ?
A: We use it to more accurately predict energy usage for others, the same as we use data from others for estimating yours.

Q: Why do we require that we use a GMail account ?
A: We use Google forms who insist on this for any forms that have file uploads, as we do with your HDF file. Thus you use a GMail, Yahoo, Outlook or perhaps a "whiteboxed" service, so ABC@dcu.ie is actually ABC@gmail.com.

Q: Why are you doing this, what's in it for you ?
A: We do not have any fee, there is no kickback from any of the suppliers, we don't ask for donations, we are doing this because we are interested in what data from smart meters can be used for.

Q: Who funds this ?
A: This work is supported by the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University, funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

Q: Who are you ?
A: Alan Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University and Xianjuan Chen and Shuxiang Cai are students working on this project for their research thesis.