Octopus Energy Tariffs Explained: OctopusPeaker vs. OctopusFlexi

If you've got a solar battery and you're with Octopus Energy NZ, the plan that usually pays best is OctopusPeaker, which can pay you in the order of $1.00 to $2.00+ per kWh for power you export during a peak-demand event, versus a flat buy-back of roughly 12 to 17 cents per kWh on a standard plan. OctopusFlexi, by contrast, is a time-of-use import plan: it doesn't reward export in the same way, but it can cut what you pay to charge a battery or run a heat pump overnight. In short: Peaker is about getting paid handsomely for exporting at the right moment; Flexi is about buying at low cost at the right moment. The trick, and where the real money is, is running both ideas together with a battery that's smart enough to act on its own.

Octopus arrived in New Zealand by buying out the old Trustpower retail book, and they've brought a genuinely different way of thinking about power pricing with them. For a solar-and-battery household, that difference can be worth real money each year, but only if you understand what each plan actually does and you set your system up to take advantage of it. Get it wrong and you'll leave hundreds of dollars on the table. Get it right and your battery starts earning its keep instead of just sitting there feeling clever.

The big idea: dynamic pricing, and why it exists

Most New Zealand power plans hide the wholesale market from you. You pay a tidy fixed rate per kWh, and the retailer wears the risk of prices spiking on a cold, still winter evening. That's comfortable, but it means you never see the moments when electricity is genuinely valuable, and you can never get paid for helping out.

The wholesale spot market, run through the Electricity Authority, moves in 30-minute trading periods. On a calm winter evening when everyone's home with the heat pump on and the hydro lakes are low, the spot price can leap to several dollars per kWh for a short window. On a sunny, breezy spring afternoon it can fall close to zero, and occasionally goes negative. Dynamic pricing simply passes some of that signal through to you.

For a battery owner, this is the whole game. A battery lets you buy when power is low-cost and sell when it's dear, and dynamic pricing is what turns that physical ability into dollars. Without a price signal that moves, a battery is just backup. With one, it's a small earning asset.

OctopusPeaker: getting paid to export when the grid is desperate

OctopusPeaker is the headline act for battery owners. The concept is straightforward: when the grid is under genuine strain, Octopus calls a peak event and pays you a sharply elevated rate for every kWh you export during that window. These events are usually flagged in advance, often the day before or the morning of, and they cluster around the predictable evening peak (roughly 5pm to 9pm) on cold weekdays.

The payment during an event is the standout. Rather than the flat 12 to 17 cents most retailers offer for daytime solar export, a peak event can pay well over a dollar per kWh, and at times considerably more, because that's roughly what the power is worth to the grid in that moment. You're effectively being paid the same kind of premium a peaker plant gets, which is exactly where the name comes from.

Here's the part the marketing doesn't dwell on: Peaker rewards you for exporting, not for hoarding. The household that wins on Peaker is the one that fills its battery at low cost during the day (from solar, or from off-peak grid power) and then deliberately pushes a big chunk of that stored energy back to the grid during the event, rather than just using it at home. That's counterintuitive. Most people buy a battery to become self-sufficient in the evening. On Peaker, the smarter move during a called event can be to run your house off the grid as normal and sell your battery's contents at the premium rate.

A worked example

Say you've got a 10kWh usable battery in a Canterbury home on the Orion network. A peak event is called for 6pm to 8pm on a frosty July weekday, paying $1.50/kWh for export.

• Through the day your solar fills the battery to full, essentially for free (energy you'd otherwise have exported at ~15c).
• At 6pm, instead of running the house off the battery, you let the house draw from the grid and you export 8kWh from the battery over the two hours.
• That export earns roughly 8 x $1.50 = $12.00 for one evening.
• You'll buy back some grid power that evening to run the house, say 4kWh at a peak import rate of around 35c, costing about $1.40.
• Net for the event: roughly $10.60, versus maybe $1.20 of avoided cost if you'd just self-consumed the same energy.

Stack a couple of dozen of those events across a winter and the difference is no longer trivial. That's the unique lever Peaker gives you, and it's why a battery on a flat buy-back plan is leaving money behind.

OctopusFlexi: low-cost power at the right hours

OctopusFlexi works from the other direction. It's a time-of-use import plan, splitting the day into pricing bands so that off-peak power (typically overnight and parts of the day) is materially lower-priced than peak (the evening crunch). The savings come from shifting your big loads into the low-cost windows.

For a solar household this matters most for the things you can time:

• Battery charging from the grid on a dark winter week when solar can't fill it.
• EV charging overnight in the lowest-priced band.
• Hot water cylinder heating shifted off the peak.
• Dishwasher and washing machine timers set to run off-peak.

Flexi doesn't pay a premium for export the way Peaker does, so on its own it's less exciting for a battery owner who wants to earn. Its job is to keep your import costs down. The household that benefits most from Flexi is one with high, flexible overnight demand: think an EV doing a decent daily commute, plus a battery that occasionally needs a grid top-up in winter.

So which one, Peaker or Flexi?

It comes down to your gear and your habits.

• Battery, and you can automate export? Peaker is usually where the money is. The export premium during events dwarfs the modest off-peak import savings of Flexi.
• No battery, but an EV or flexible heavy loads? Flexi tends to win, because you can't capture export premiums without storage, but you can absolutely shift your buying into the low-cost bands.
• Both a battery and a big EV habit? This is the genuinely tricky case. You're weighing the export earnings of Peaker against the import savings of Flexi, and the answer depends on your numbers.

Octopus's plans and exact rates move around, and the spot market underneath them moves constantly, so don't take a number you read anywhere (including here) as gospel for your own bill. The honest way to compare is to model your own usage against current rates. We built a tool that lets you do exactly that, comparing dynamic plans against flat buy-backs for your own consumption shape: have a play with the dynamic tariff and buy-back engine before you commit to anything.

How to automate your battery to export during peak (the actual money-maker)

Here's where Peaker goes from "nice idea" to "real income", and where most homeowners get stuck. A peak event might be called for two hours on a Tuesday evening while you're cooking dinner and wrangling kids. You are not going to be standing at an app discharging your battery by hand. The automation has to do it for you, every time, or the value evaporates.

Step one: a battery and inverter that can be controlled

Not every battery setup can be told to "export now" on a schedule or a signal. You need a system whose inverter supports forced discharge to grid (sometimes called "export" or "sell" mode), controllable either through the manufacturer's own app scheduling or through an open interface. Common hybrid inverter brands installed in New Zealand (the likes of Fronius, GoodWe, Sungrow, SolarEdge and Tesla Powerwall) handle this differently, and some are far more flexible than others. This is a question to put to your installer before you buy, not after.

Step two: schedule against the event window

Because Peaker events are flagged ahead of time and cluster in the predictable evening peak, the simplest reliable approach is a time-of-use discharge schedule: tell the battery to hold its charge through the afternoon, then force-export a set amount of power across the 5pm to 9pm window on weekdays. You reserve a buffer (say 20 to 30 percent) so you're not left flat if there's an outage, and you let the rest flow to the grid.

This captures the bulk of the value with zero daily effort. You're not chasing every single event perfectly; you're positioning the battery to be in "sell" mode whenever the premium is most likely to appear.

Step three (advanced): act on the live signal

The keen end of town goes further and links the battery's behaviour to the actual event signal or the wholesale spot price, using a home automation platform (Home Assistant is the popular choice among the tinkerers) to trigger force-export only when a premium is genuinely on. This squeezes out the most value and avoids dumping your battery on an evening when the rate isn't elevated. It's powerful, but it's firmly in DIY-enthusiast territory and well beyond what most households want to maintain.

A piece of advice the installers rarely volunteer: battery warranties are written around a certain number of cycles or a throughput limit per year. Aggressively charging and discharging to chase export premiums uses cycles faster than gentle self-consumption does. Before you set up daily force-export, read your battery's warranty terms on annual throughput. Earning $400 a year in export is a poor trade if it quietly clips years off a battery that cost you $12,000. Run the maths on cycle cost per kWh, not just the export rate.

The traps to watch with dynamic plans

Dynamic pricing is genuinely good for the right household, but it isn't free of teeth.

• Import exposure cuts both ways. On a fully dynamic import plan, a cold still evening when you haven't got stored power to lean on can mean buying at a painful spot rate. A battery is what protects you here; without one, dynamic import is a gamble.
• Export caps and network limits. Your local lines company sets how much you're allowed to export, and it isn't unlimited. On Vector in Auckland, Orion in Canterbury, Wellington Electricity, Aurora in Otago and the rest, export limits and any associated charges vary by network. A premium export rate is no use if your connection caps how many kW you can push back. Check your export approval before you bank on big peak exports.
• The rate is not guaranteed forever. Dynamic tariffs are a young market in New Zealand. Premium export rates exist because the grid currently values that flexibility; they can be revised. Don't buy a battery purely on today's Peaker rate. Buy it for the underlying value (self-consumption, backup, resilience) and treat the export earnings as upside.
• It needs a compatible meter. Time-of-use and dynamic plans rely on a smart meter reading at interval level. Most NZ homes have one now, but confirm it.

Who shouldn't bother

Plain honesty: dynamic plans are not for everyone.

If you don't have a battery and you can't shift much load (no EV, hot water already on a controlled circuit, you're out all day), a dynamic plan adds complexity for little gain. A simple, decent flat buy-back may serve you better and let you sleep easier.

If you've got a battery but no way to automate export, you'll capture a fraction of Peaker's value and may find the effort isn't worth it. Sort the automation question first.

And if the idea of your power price changing through the day stresses you out, that's a perfectly valid reason to stay on something predictable. The best plan is the one you'll actually manage well, not the one with the flashiest peak rate.

What to Do Next

A sensible order of operations:

• Pull your half-hourly usage data. You can request interval data from your current retailer. This is the raw material for any honest comparison.
• Model it. Run your real usage against current dynamic rates rather than trusting a brochure average.
• Confirm your battery can force-export. Ask your installer, by inverter model, whether scheduled grid export is supported and how it's controlled.
• Check your export approval with your lines company. Know your kW limit before you plan around it.
• Read the battery warranty's throughput terms. Make sure your export strategy stays inside them.

If you're weighing Octopus against the rest of the market, it's worth seeing how the dynamic-export idea looks elsewhere. Ecotricity's Resi-Flex peak export plan works on a similar premium-export principle, and it's a fair comparison. For a more traditional approach, it pays to understand how Meridian's solar buy-back plans and Power Edge's buy-back contracts are structured, so you can see what you'd be giving up or gaining by going dynamic. And if you want the lay of the land across the whole market, start with our broader rundown of NZ solar tariffs and retailers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I be on OctopusPeaker and OctopusFlexi at the same time?

The plans are structured differently and aren't always stackable as a single product, since Peaker centres on premium export events and Flexi on time-of-use import bands. Octopus's exact plan combinations change, so confirm directly with them what's currently available together. The principle you're chasing either way is: buy low, export dear.

How much can a battery actually earn on OctopusPeaker?

It depends on your battery size, how many events are called in your area, the rate per event, and how much you export each time. As a rough sense of scale, a 10kWh battery diligently exporting through winter events can earn a few hundred dollars a year, on top of the savings it already delivers through self-consumption. Treat that as upside, not the reason to buy.

Do I need a special meter?

Yes. Dynamic and time-of-use plans rely on a smart meter that records usage in intervals (usually half-hourly). Most New Zealand homes already have one, but check with Octopus before signing up.

Will exporting hard during peaks damage my battery?

It won't damage it, but it does use cycles faster than gentle self-consumption, and most battery warranties cap annual throughput. Read your warranty's terms and make sure your export schedule stays inside them. The cycle cost per kWh should be part of your earnings maths.

What happens on a cold evening if my battery is empty and I'm on a dynamic import plan?

You'd buy from the grid at whatever the rate is in that window, which can be high during a genuine peak. This is exactly why a battery is the safety net for dynamic import: it lets you avoid buying at the worst moments. Without storage, dynamic import carries real price risk.

Does my lines company affect what I can export?

Yes. Your local network (Vector, Orion, Wellington Electricity, Aurora and so on) sets your export limit and any associated terms, and they vary. A high export rate is no good if your connection caps how many kW you can push back, so confirm your export approval before planning around big peak exports.

Is OctopusPeaker worth it without a battery?

Largely no. Without storage you can't choose to export at the premium moment, since your solar exports whenever the sun's out, which is rarely during a winter evening peak event. The export premium is built for batteries.

How do I automate the export without being a tech wizard?

The simplest reliable method is a scheduled discharge: tell your battery to hold charge through the afternoon and force-export across the evening peak window on weekdays, keeping a reserve buffer. Most modern hybrid inverters can do this through their own app. The live-signal, fully automated approach is powerful but firmly in enthusiast territory.

The Bottom Line

OctopusPeaker rewards you for sending stored power back when the grid needs it most, and that's where a battery genuinely earns. OctopusFlexi rewards you for buying when power is low-priced, which suits flexible loads and EVs more than export. The household that does best treats these as two halves of one strategy: fill low, sell dear, and let the automation handle the timing so you never have to think about it on a Tuesday night.

Before you switch anything, model your own half-hourly usage, confirm your battery can force-export, and check your network's export limit. If you're still weighing up whether a battery makes sense for your roof and your habits in the first place, it's worth getting real numbers from people who'll do the job properly.