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How locational, or "zonal" pricing could give Scotland the cheapest power in Europe

... and give everyone else in GB cheaper power too.

UK renewables are at record highs, with electricity prices dropping below £0 for 135 hours this year due to excess generation. Instead of paying wind farms to shut down, Octopus Energy advocates for allowing customers to use this surplus power. To reduce renewable energy wastage and lower bills, we must remove Final Consumption Levies from all flexible consumption. Read more here.

Right now, wind turbines are being switched off even when they're spinning fast and generating loads of cheap, clean energy. Find out how we're helping to transform the energy system with green initiatives, ideas and innovation.

In light of rising constraint costs, some suggest the solution is to amend current market arrangements instead of creating more regional (also known as locational) wholesale energy markets. We have found they will not fix the current issues. In fact, they might even make things worse for consumers, investors, and the overall energy system.

Read more to discover why.

Why energy needs urgent market reform through zonal pricing: a rebuttal to RenewableUK

The key points in our response to the Government’s most recent consultation on the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA), which explores wholesale and investment support reforms required to reach Net Zero.

We published ‘End the Gridlock’ one year ago to raise awareness about the challenges we faced connecting new renewable energy project to the grid. This paper updates and expands on our recommendations from ‘End the Gridlock’, focussing on areas where we think current reform plans could be improved.

Assessing the impact that large demand users siting in response to regional prices - moving from South to North - could have on their bills, all GB consumer bills, carbon emissions and the need for new network infrastructure.

Today, the dominant form of heating in the UK is gas boilers. We are very aware of this, so much so that we’re currently one of the nation’s biggest suppliers of natural gas. And as a company who loves our customers we do the best possible job for them.

This paper analyses the results from Octopus Energy’s Saving Sessions campaign - part of ESO’s Demand Flexibility Service and the largest ever consumer flexibility campaign. Over 700,000 customers shifted over 1.86GWh of demand flexibility, proving that consumer flexibility is ready to deliver a low-carbon, cost-effective resource to the grid at gigawatt scale today. We look at key results, including customer response and participation levels, as well as recommendations for the future of the Demand Flexibility Service, due to launch in November 2023.

The GB grid is broken. Renewable developers are facing queues of up to 15 years to get projects connected. In this paper, we make six recommendations - across a number of different areas that should allow networks to make better use of consumer flexibility to manage constraints, provide users with better visibility about where it's most system-beneficial to connect, and changes which should reduce the time it takes to connect.

This paper looks at the evolving mix of technologies connecting to distribution networks, and assesses what new challenges and opportunities they introduce that should inform local market design. We review the current tools being used to manage local congestion (DNO flexibility markets, dynamic distribution charging and flexible connections), their pros and cons, and recommend a new vision for future local flexibility markets (dynamic distribution charging) that we think will be more resilient to many of these emerging challenges.

We’re in the middle of a massive, system-wide transformation in energy. The change is crucial because the power sources we rely on are changing. Moving from “burning fossil fuels on demand” to “producing power according to when the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing” means we need to look at new, creative ways to balance energy needs with generation to ensure our future electricity system remains safe and reliable.

Decarbonisation has never been more critical, but the case for significant market reform is now just as much about energy security, and making our system affordable. Find out how we can ramp up low carbon flexibility through market reform and key supporting policy measures.

With energy costs going up, the energy crisis has brought new attention to all the smaller costs that make up your electricity bill; including green levies. Tin this blog we look at how taking them out of customers’ bills and including them in ‘general taxation’ would help unleash energy flexibility, making the grid greener in the process.