As the UK faces soaring temperatures reaching up to 40°C during the current heatwave, Octopus Energy has urged its 1.8 million smart customers to participate in a critical energy-saving initiative. Known as a Saving Session, this program encourages customers to reduce their electricity use between 7.30pm and 8.30pm to alleviate stress on the national grid.
Millions of customers have been praised for adjusting their energy consumption habits, particularly by shifting usage away from peak dinnertime hours, thereby helping to stabilize the grid during this challenging period.
Octopus Energy has announced its second Saving Session this week, inviting 1.2 million customers to voluntarily lower their power consumption during the designated hour. Participants will earn 415 OctoPoints (equivalent to 52p) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy saved, turning conservation into a financial reward.
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This demand shifting is supported by a robust network of approximately 440,000 connected devices—such as home batteries and electric vehicles—and other smart tariffs. Customers enrolled in tariffs like Intelligent Octopus Go, Intelligent Octopus Flux, and Octopus Agile are contributing automatically, often without altering their daily routines.
The adoption of these smart tariffs is playing a vital role in easing energy costs and grid pressures during extreme weather events. Although Saving Sessions were initially developed to address winter grid challenges amid the energy crisis, their effectiveness during summer peak demand periods has become increasingly apparent.
Greg Jackson, Founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Group, emphasized the impact of this flexible, modern approach to energy management: “Our customers are proving that a modern, flexible green grid is happening right now. Faced with a heatwave and unexpected grid constraints, over a million British homes are happy to shift their usage, move their charging to different times, and get paid for doing so. With market reform like zonal pricing and increased use of this flexibility, we could largely eliminate these periodic grid issues far more cheaply than relentlessly building new infrastructure.”