Skip to main content

The first ‘time of use’ tariff in the UK

by Futures Centre, May 8
2 minutes read

Green Energy has launched Tide, an online-only energy tariff that rewards households for shifting their energy demand away from peak times by using the timers on their washing machine or dishwasher and powering their electric car overnight.  Customers pay a variable rate for their electricity and gas depending according to the time of day they use it: £0.05 (6 US cents) per kWh tariff for seven overnight hours and a £0.25 (30 US cents) figure for 16.00 to 19.00 on weekdays. Intermediate times are priced at £0.12. 

Chris Goodall says of the tariff, “Very roughly, a typical household taking the new Green Energy package will pay about £570 for electricity compared to about £580 for the Scottish Power tariff, the cheapest mainstream supplier at the moment. The difference is therefore small but the gap is widened if the household takes deliberate action to move its energy use out of the penal 3 hour weekday tariff between 16.00 and 19.00.” 

Goodall says cooking is the largest single element across the week at 121 watts, with audiovisual kit next at 92 watts. Cold appliance and washing and drying machines follow at between 60 and 70 watt each. These power uses could easily be pushed outside of peak periods. Fridges, for example, can be automatically turned off for three hours with no impact on food quality. It should be easy to reduce typical demand by 150 watts in the peak period and this would increase the saving to around £25, making the Green Energy tariff probably the cheapest in the UK at the moment.” 

Details

by Futures Centre Spotted 1998 signals

Have you spotted a signal of change?

Register to receive the latest from the Futures Centre.
Sign up

  • 0
  • Share

Related signals

Our use of cookies

We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We'd also like to set optional analytics cookies to help us improve it. We won't set optional cookies unless you enable them. Using this tool will set a cookie on your device to remember your preferences.

For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our Cookies page.

Necessary cookies

Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.

Analytics cookies

We'd like to set Google Analytics cookies to help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify anyone. For more information on how these cookies work, please see our 'Cookies page'.

>