A SEG! In disguise.

 I had applied to get a SEG in October.  It's the scheme through which you can get some financial remuneration for the electricity you generate with your renewable setup but don't use yourself, and therefore feed back into the grid. I had hoped it was just a formality! But it quickly turned out that it wasn't. My application was rejected. And after some emailing to and fro I figured I knew what the problem was. Scottish Power had received my form, and acknowledged that, but hadn’t checked it yet. Octopus had applied for my SEG, which had been turned down because of this unchecked form. Scottish Power had declared they wouldn’t tell me when they would get around to checking it, so Octopus had to just re-apply at random, hoping at some point they would do so after the form had been OK’d. It didn’t sound ideal!

One day I noticed an email from Octopus. Would that be good news? I opened it and it said it was. However; it was not the good news I expected. To my surprise, the email told me I had successfully transferred from my previous energy supplier to them! What? I had not asked for that! I had only applied for an SEG. This was weird. I decided to phone them.

I had a very helpful lady on the phone who confirmed that at least this email was genuine; it was not a scam by an Octopus impersonator. And she confirmed that my SEG application had been successful. Clearly, somehow the wrong automatic message has been sent to me. That was a relief! And later that day the correct message reached me; my SEG had been approved. Hurray! 

I'm not quite sure what the next step is. I suppose that I will just get a little update once every few months that tells me how much I have fed into the net and how much money I will get for that. I have a smart meter; they can just take the information from there I suppose! And given that I am writing this in December, for now I am not actually feeling an awful lot into the grid. But the day will come that I will! I am glad that this has sorted itself without any further hassle. Sometimes things just work out. Fortunately.

The confusing email