Retail offer overview
Retail offers represent the rates that Homeowners or Businesses pay for their electricity supply and associated services. They're used by the UPowr platform to forecast the amount a Customer will save on their electricity bill when they install a distributed energy system.
These offers can be:
- Government regulated or default market offers
- Offers generally available in the market
- Offers restricted to particular customer segments
- Prospective or hypothetical offers
Charge types
Retail offers are made up of four charge types.
| Charge type | Description |
|---|---|
| Usage charges | The rates a customer pays for using a kWh unit of electricity. These may vary by time of day, day of week, month or season. There are also different rates for dedicated circuits, such as controlled load. |
| Supply charges | The rates a customer pays for their electricity supply. These aren’t related to electricity use and are typically a fixed charge per day or month. |
| Other charges | The additional charges that some business customers pay for environmental or energy efficiency schemes or for market operator services. |
| Export tariffs | The feed-in-tariff credits that are paid to a customer for exporting a kWh unit of electricity to the grid. This includes ‘premium’ feed-in tariffs paid through government schemes. |
For business customers, there may be separate fixed daily or monthly charges for metering services. Currently we only accept a single supply charge entry. Additional fixed charges can be bundled into this.
Savings forecasts
The Platform calculates a Customer's savings as part of the Design system task
In this task, you'll choose the Customer's:
- Current retail offer: This represents the electricity rates paid by the customer prior to having a distributed energy system installed as reflected in a recent electricity bill or billing data, preferably from the last year.
- Forecast retail offer: This represents the forecasted or estimated electricity rates a customer is assumed to pay after the proposed distributed energy system is installed.
The current and forecast retail offers can be the same, but they do not need to be. This depends on the desired retail offer scenario you want to model when generating the quote.
Default retail offers
In the Class manager, you can set the default Retail offer for a DNSP by class. This Retail offer will then be applied to any Quote where the Site is located in the DNSP area.
If you don't enable the flag, then a generic default - typically a government regulated offer - is applied.