Octopus Energy

Let's stop wasting our energy. Greg Jackson was on Times Radio yesterday making the case for pricing wind where it's abundant instead of switching it off. We've been running the small-scale version of that idea for three years, and it works. Free Power Hours: when a region's sitting on surplus power, we give customers the chance to unlock free electricity for a few hours, through schemes like Weekend Happy Hours & Power Ups. Fan Club: live near one of our turbines in Yorkshire, Wales or offshore Lincolnshire, and your bill could drop up to 50% when it's spinning hard nearby. Plots For Kilowatts: this answers the "why hasn't this scaled" question. It matches communities that want a turbine with land that could take one. We've had 47,000 households ask us for a Fan Club already, so the real bottleneck has been finding sites fast enough to keep pace with that demand. Where do you think this stalls first: planning, grid capacity, or just the fairness question: should your postcode change your price?

We've been talking about this for years: bills are too high. And then they rise again. Today, the October price cap was confirmed - up 3.6%, to £1,723 a year for a typical household. Greg Jackson broke it down on Good Morning Britain this morning: every week, half a million people call us. Most aren't ringing about a fault - they're worried about paying. Two crises are hitting at once. Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, and a war in Ukraine still grinding on. Wholesale gas prices have more than doubled since the start of the year - and because Britain leans so heavily on imported gas, we feel it harder than most. The government's VAT cut on electricity, and removing some of the levies from bills, has helped soften the blow this winter. But bills are still too high. We urgently need to reform the market, make better use of our wind, and let people benefit from cheaper prices when green energy is abundant.

£100 million. That’s what we’ve paid our customers over the past year for solar power they generated and didn’t even need. Britain complains about heat with exactly the same enthusiasm as it complains about rain. Fair enough. It’s our fifth heatwave of the year, and we’ve already had more days above 30°C than in the whole of the past decade. There’s an ominous undertone to it all. But the cloudless sky has a silver lining. Customers with solar earned an average of £244 each for sharing their spare power with the grid, on top of all their energy bill savings. After back to back gas crises, people are turning to solar for energy independence. Almost 74,000 people asked us about installing solar between May and July, up 34% on last year. On 26 June, the hottest day so far, enquiries were 50% higher than usual, presumably somewhere between the desk fan aisle and a cold shower. Batteries are moving even faster, up 630% year on year. More than 400,000 of our customers now export to the grid, sending back 825 GWh between them, about what a medium-sized gas plant produces in a year. Solar made up a record 14.4% of Britain’s electricity this year. And plug-in solar arriving in supermarkets this year will make the technology cheaper and more accessible than ever. The climate is changing. Thankfully, so is the way we power Britain.

We let down a group of elderly residents in France 😔 🇫🇷 We took the wrong info at sign-up and were slow to fix it. The easy move would've been a sorry email... But a human error deserves a human response. Instead of emailing an "oups!", two of our French team - Aude and Philip - got on a train. Laptops in bags, headed to the residence. Spent a Wednesday afternoon at a ballroom table, fixing every contract by hand. One resident at a time. Along the way they met Paulette. 101 years old. Our newest, and now oldest, customer. When we do make mistakes, we own them and fix them. And we do it in person - if that's what it takes. Thanks heaps to the lovely group of customers who welcomed Aude and Philip that day!

Full moon. Half moon. TOTAL ECLIPSE 🌚 …well, 91% if you’re in the UK, but it didn’t sound as punchy. On Wednesday, the UK sees its first solar eclipse since 1999. We’re using it as a live test with a free energy reward at the end of it: how much difference can British households make to help the grid? An eclipse is the PERFECT time to prove people have the power to avoid fossil fuels and make the most of renewables — and they can reap the benefits of doing so. When solar generation drops just as everyone gets home for tea, we sometimes need to fire up extra fossil fuels to fill the gap. So from 6-8pm on Wednesday 12 August, we’re asking customers to use less electricity. If they do, we’ll give them an hour of free power on Sunday, up to 16kWh each (that's power to light up a stadium!) This isn’t a one-off. Our customers have already earned more than £10 million through Saving Sessions and saved more than £100 million by shifting their energy with our smart tariffs. We hope this eclipse gives even more people a glimpse of a brighter way to use energy. Just don’t forget the proper protective eyewear 😎 Sign up below 👇 #SavingSessions #OctoEclipse

CEO advice: keep the promises you make down the pub, and tell your secrets to strangers.🍻 Our founder, Greg Jackson, sat down with the brilliant Sir John Hegarty for The Business of Creativity to talk about how Octopus really got started (in short - it involves a mate, a pint, and a dare that turned into the company we know today). Full episode in the comments👇

BIG NEWS 🏡 💰 'Octopus and and Santander UK launch UK’s first high-street bank mortgage for Zero Bills homes' 🥳 Santander, are the first major lender 🏦 to support #ZeroBills homes 🏡 , unlocking up to £29k more borrowing when buying a Zero Bills new build home, using their bespoke affordability assessment. This is a huge milestone 🙌 helping more people access homes that are cheaper to run from day one, including at gs8's site 'Carpenters Yard' 🏡 in Epping! One of the many sites that are now able to benefit from this new Santander Zero Bills mortgage! 🎉 Full article here: https://lnkd.in/eX53tQpH Hannah McCarthyNigel BanksJenny JenkinsChris Hall Will Matthews Paul McCarthy Bruce McDonald Danny Rowland

~£45 off your yearly electricity bill from October. But is that the ceiling or just the start? Yesterday, in one of his first acts as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham scrapped VAT on household electricity bills. It'll come straight off customers bills just in time for winter. Great first instinct from the new PM to cut bills on day one in government but there is a lot further his new administration can go to deliver real change for customers. Our own analysis with FTI Consulting last week showed two more moves that could bring bills down further: ⚡️ £75 more if levies on electricity bills move into general taxation, so higher earners pick up more of the cost ⚡️ £114 more from fixing the wholesale electricity market, which currently pays wind farms to switch off while paying gas plants to switch on elsewhere to cover the gap ⚡️Plus the £45 already coming in October, from the VAT cut - add it all up and that's £230+ off the average bill. Ultimately, the cheaper electricity gets, the more it pays to have gone electric already with heat pumps, EV’s, solar… we’ll keep fighting to make electric tech the best choice for all. Budget's next 🐙 Greg breaks down what the gov’t’ announcement means for your bills below👇

England's win over Norway went to extra time. So did the National Grid. (Obviously it would be us Octonerds looking this stuff up...) Kick-off: household electricity up 9%. The equaliser: up 11%. Then Bellingham's winner in extra time, and pubs spiked to 42% above normal by 1am. Nobody was going home early. Some fans didn't go to bed at all. Usage stayed 18% above normal from 2am to 5am as people waited to see who England play next (Argentina, it turns out). Sunday morning was quieter. 7% down between 7 and 9.30am. (Can't blame them) We've kept the free electricity flowing for pubs too, 7pm to midnight, every England & Scotland match, through our Octopus Energy for Business scheme Watt a Save. Seemed like the least we could do in a summer that’s already been so buzzing ⚽️⚡️

Two years ago at the #OctopusEnergy #EnergyTechSummit in Berlin, we announced the #MercuryConsortium with a pretty wild vision: make it the "Bluetooth of energy" and finally fix the fragmentation holding back cheap, smart, flexible energy systems. Today, we hit a massive milestone. There are now 1.25 million Mercury-certified devices out in the wild. 🌍 Zaptec , Easee , and our own Octopus Charge are leading the charge, with 12 more incredible clean-tech brands joining the ecosystem soon. Scale is everything if we’re going to build a truly flexible, green energy system. This is just the beginning. ⚡️ Devrim Celal Anthony Fernandez Kurt Østrem Greg Jackson EPRI Kraken Andrew Molineux Alan O'Donnell Octopus Energy Mercury Consortium