Energy companies in the UK are a scam

Yes, more news at 11. It a different theme than what I originally intended for this blog, but I needed to get this out of my chest.

Twelve days ago, following this excellent guide, I "frankensteined" together an ESP32 micro-controller and a photo-diode to allow me to monitor my solar panel generation statistics and store/display them in Home Assistant. At the same time I also took a manual reading of the "dumb" meter to compare the readings later.

Today I took another manual reading, and the numbers reported by Home Assistant are very accurate! In these past 12 days, the panels have generated just shy of 78 kWh! At our current tariff with British Gas (33.982p/kWh), that's over £26 in potential savings.

But why "potential savings", one may ask?
That's because the bulk of the energy is produced during daytime (duh), and during this time all lights in the house are off, the TV is usually off, and the only thing using any meaningful amount of energy are my servers, which together use well under 300W (for reference, even on a cloudy day, the panels put out a steady 400-600W).

All the solar energy produced but not used is "generously donated" - or in technical terms, "exported" - to the grid. You get nothing for it, unless you register for a scheme called "Smart Export Guarantee". In this scheme, you need to register your solar installation with an energy provider, and they pay you back for the energy you export to the grid. Different providers pay different rates, and you don't necessarily need to register with the same provider you already use to import energy. Sounds good, right? This is where my anger towards British Gas begins.

First of all, if you do nothing, they will gladly and silently take the excess energy for free. To my knowledge, no communication of any kind was ever sent saying we needed to register for anything, which is rather shitty from them if you ask me.

Next, there's the bureaucracy. So far they were quite happy to receive the excess energy for free, but now that I want compensation for the energy produced by the equipment I own, I suddenly need to provide a thousand obscure certificates, all written in unicorn blood and blessed by the Pope. And don't even think about emailing their dedicated SEG support team, asking for clarification on some ambiguous wording. After 10 days of waiting, all I got was a template email with the same ambiguous text on their SEG page. Bravo!

And then there are the rates... As I mentioned above, our "import rate" (how much we pay for kWh coming from the grid) is 33.982 pence per kWh. Now the rate British Gas will pay you for the energy you export? An astounding 6.4 pence per kWh! Less than a 5th! And in my case, They're unfortunately the highest paying provider, if I did my research right.

Knowing all of this, I decided to run some numbers. As mentioned before, had I used all the energy produced by the solar panels, I would have saved over £26 in only 12 days. So I went outside and poked the buttons on the smart meter to get a cumulative reading of all the energy exported to the grid since the meter was installed, roughly a year ago. The total was 514 kWh (not bad!).
If you multiply that by the rate paid by BG, I would have made the absolute fortune of £32.89 over this period. Yeah, fuck that.

I'm fairly upset with this whole situation. It's all rigged, they put every hurdle in your way, and then make the compansation completely meaningless if you insist on pushing through. The consumer always gets the short end of the stick.
The only way to work around this is by installing battery storage and keeping all the excess energy in for use in the afternoon/night, but that's a big investment I simply cannot justify at present.

Oh, and I know this is already quite long, but as a bonus: account credits my ass!
I'm lending money interest-free to a multi-billion Dollar company so they can gamble it away!