The grid will now pay you
to use more electricity.
For three years the deal was simple. Use less power when the grid is busy, get paid. As of April, it works the other way round too. There are now hours when Britain has too much electricity and would quite like you to take some off its hands. This is the single biggest change to how households can earn from the grid, and almost nobody has mentioned it.
🔄 The grid changed the rules and did not send a letter
In April the Demand Flexibility Service was rebuilt. The headline change: it is now bi-directional. That is a horrible phrase, so here is what it means in English.
It used to be one game. The grid gets tight, everyone is asked to switch things off, the people who do get paid. That still happens.
The new bit is the opposite game. Sometimes Britain generates more electricity than it can use. Wind is howling, sun is blazing, everyone is at the beach. In those hours the grid is desperate for someone, anyone, to please use some power. Now it will pay you to do it.
🔌 You are being paid to charge your car
Read that again, because it is genuinely absurd and completely real. There are hours in the week when charging your EV is not a cost. It is income.
The same applies to a home battery filling up, a hot water tank heating, a heat pump running a bit harder than it strictly needs to. Anything that can store energy for later can be paid to hoover up electricity that would otherwise have been thrown away.
The alternative, if nobody takes it, is that a wind farm in Scotland gets switched off and we all pay for the privilege. More on that on Monday.
📉 The threshold dropped to almost nothing
The other change nobody covered: the minimum size to take part fell to 0.1 megawatts.
A single house is nowhere near 0.1MW. A single house is not going to be near 0.1MW in your lifetime. But a few thousand houses, pooled together and pointed at the grid as one block, comfortably clears it.
That is the entire reason companies like us exist. On your own you are a rounding error. Bundled up, you are a power station.
For a hundred years the deal was that the grid decides and you pay. The deal now is that the grid asks nicely and you get paid. It is a better deal. It has been sitting there since April. Your kettle has not noticed.