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Consumer appetite to participate in last winter’s Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) significantly drove smart meter uptake among Octopus Energy customers, the company’s chief executive has told Utility Week.
Octopus saw almost 700,000 customers take part in its Saving Sessions to help reduce peak demand on the power grid over winter as part of the Electricity System Operator’s DFS.
During an extended interview at Octopus’ London HQ recently, the supplier’s founder and chief executive Greg Jackson spoke about the impact the company’s participation in the DFS had in regards to its smart meter rollout.
He said: “We had thousands and thousands of messages from customers who were participating (in the DFS) and loved it and thousands from people who couldn’t participate because they didn’t have a smart meter at the time.
“It [the DFS] was the single best driver of smart meters… we saw a visible uplift and we saw frustration when customers didn’t have one [and so couldn’t take part in the DFS].”
The uplift described by Jackson saw bookings for smart meter installations increase by 73% compared to the same period the year before. Octopus has installed more than 1.3 million smart meters in total so far.
The supplier has since revealed that to date 1 million of its smart meter customers have taken up its smart offerings such as Saving Sessions, the Winter Workout and smart tariffs.
Octopus customers participating in the DFS collectively reduced their electricity demand by 1.86GWh across 13 windows lasting a total of 14.5 hours. Octopus said this represents an average reduction of 128MW per hour.
In exchange, customers were paid a total of £5.3 million at an average price of £2.85/kWh. The average earning per customer was in the region of £7.50, although the average for the top 5% of earners was more than £41.
Octopus said they prevented more than 430 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere.
Under a “fairly moderate” scenario, the ESO expects around 1GW of capacity to be made available through the DFS. In a more optimistic outlook, the ESO thinks up to 2GW could be made available.
The moderate estimate of 1GW is triple the 350MW made available through the DFS last winter, while the ambitious 2GW target is six times as much.
The full interview with Greg Jackson will be available in our Digital Weekly edition on Thursday (26 October). You will be able to access it here once it is published.
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