AGL drained householder's solar battery at peak times then slammed him with peak rates for using the grid.
Peter Anderson joined AGL’s solar battery plan in 2021 and accepted $1,000 off his battery installation costs in return for participating in a VPP or virtual power plant, a scheme where AGL aggregates householders’ batteries, using those devices according to the needs of the grid.
He signed up for a five year deal.
For the first year, everything was fine.
“It was all very gentle and easy going,” Mr Anderson says, “It was, ‘Hey, this is what it is, we promise we won't do these things, we promise we will do these things, we knock a thousand bucks off the battery, we put you on a five-year deal to stay on the program for five years.’ The idea of it was to help stabilise the grid in times of drama. So it all seemed very reasonable. And for the first year, I don't even think they touched the battery.”
A year or so into the deal, AGL suddenly, and he says without warning, signed him up for a complicated kind of dynamic charge called a demand tariff, where the power price customers are charged is determined by their single greatest half-hourly period of electricity use from the grid across an entire month. Essentially, if you’re taking power from the grid at the peak times, you are charged more for all your power usage for the month. The power company says they adequately notified him of the change, but he says it was a complete surprise when he got the bill.
At the same time, AGL started to drain his battery at peak times, meaning that he was forced to use grid power at those times, and raising his power prices astronomically for the whole month.
He says, “They changed the way they use the battery. It went from these little bites every now and again to just full on sucking the thing down to its 5 per cent reserve level, just dragging everything out of it. And you could map when they were doing that to when the price on the (national electricity market) had skyrocketed.”
AGL disputes Mr Anderson’s claim — and in doing so basically admitted that they were draining the battery.
‘a spokeswoman rejected claims AGL ever entirely depleted the batteries of participating households, saying it was the company's policy to always leave at least 20 per cent of a charge remaining.’
Draining 80 per cent of the charge seems to be quite unreasonable.
They also claim that the demand tariff was a completely separate matter, unrelated to the regular draining of the battery, which of course it isn’t, if they were draining the battery then imposing the peak tariff. The demand tariff was so unpopular, however, that they have canned it now completely.
For Mr Anderson, his own experience was bad enough to leave the VPP scheme.
In future, he says he'll manage his own energy needs.
"This is an obvious misuse of the virtual power plant solution," he believes.
"They're draining the battery to service other clients and you're left in the lurch.
"Now, I bet if you go through the fine print … there's no guarantees around that.
"But there's the way they sell it and the spirit in which they sell it, which is very much against how they behaved."
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