Businesses and Electric Match: building a 24/7 carbon-free electricity system

Why are we talking about carbon-free electricity?

On the UK grid, electricity is traded and supply is matched to demand every half-hour. But, current carbon reporting relies on certificates (EACs) that are matched to consumption on an annual basis.

This approach doesn’t align with the reality of how the grid works. And it doesn’t provide businesses all the details of where and when the electricity that they use was generated.

Ahead of this, we know that lots of large organisations already want supply that’s traceable down to the half-hour. Businesses such as Google, Vodafone and AstraZeneca have publicly pledged their commitment to work towards being powered by 24/7 carbon-free electricity.

This is what we’re here to talk about. Why we think 24/7 is the future of business electricity, how we’ll get there, and how businesses can evidence their commitment to a greener energy system today through Electric Match.

Electric Match: carbon-free electricity for businesses

Electric Match has been supplying businesses with carbon-free, matched energy since 2023.

Our customers get their power from specific generators that Octopus works with. We allocate enough electricity to cover the amount of energy that we expect the customer to use in a year.

We match the generation from these assets against the electricity that the customer uses in real time. If the customer and the generator match exactly, every half-hour of the year, then the customer will be 100% matched.

At the moment, our Electric Match customers are reaching 60% - 80% matching. The exact levels depend on weather conditions and how each business uses energy. Every kilowatt-hour of this matched electricity is fully traceable and carbon-free.

Electric Match customers can verify that their electricity has been matched to renewables, and that this temporal matching has reduced their carbon emissions.

They can evidence this through:

• Matching reporting
  We run monthly and annual matching analysis using half-hourly customer and generator data.
• Carbon reporting
  We show customers their market, location and temporal-based scope 2 reporting, as well as the carbon benefit from being on Electric Match.
• Renewable certificates reporting
  We share details of the asset-specific EAC certificates that we allocate to customers.

How do we support customers to increase their matching levels?

Since launching Electric Match, we’ve developed a toolkit to help businesses increase their matching score. It has 4 main elements.

1. The Electric Match platform

Each Electric Match customer gets access to a bespoke, all-in platform. Here they can:

• Trace where their power comes from
  Customers can see their consumption sites and linked renewable generation assets.
• Report on their scope 2 emissions
  Customers have access to view and download all of the data we’ve mentioned above.
• Increase their matching
  We provide a forward looking forecast of generation and consumption, as well as historical matching analysis. Customers can boost longer term performance by identifying matching trends. They can improve day-to-day matching by reacting to weather variations.

Here's a couple of sneak previews of what the customers sees:

Elsewhere in the dashboard, the customer gets a look ahead at the next 48 hours of their consumption and their generators’ output. They can use this to shift more usage into high generation periods. This brings higher matching levels and more carbon-free electricity.

2. Incentivising demand flexibility

Changing business' consumption patterns may sound challenging. But, we know that businesses can and do flex when they use electricity - when given the right incentives.

We’ve shown this time and time again. Since 2023, over 5,000 businesses have shifted their way to savings of over £34,000 through Saving Sessions.

Plus, we have the only smart product for small businesses: Shape Shifters. This saves customers money when they use electricity outside of 4pm - 7pm. An average Shape Shifter moves 13% of their peak consumption to cheaper, greener periods - and some customers shifted up to 95% of their electricity usage out of peak hours!

With customers using energy flexibly, we can shape demand to better match renewables when they’re abundant.

3. Access to a range of generation types

Generation is at the heart of what we do at Octopus. This gives us access to a wide range of renewable assets.

To increase matching, variety is key. This is because renewable technologies generate power at different times, seasons, or in response to different types of weather. So diverse assets tend to be complementary and support a more robust, higher matching percentage.

The chart shows how this can look in action over 48 hours. The light blue line is what the customer uses. Solar and wind work together to meet the customer’s demand for most of this period. In this example, the sun does the heavy lifting during daylight hours, and then wind plugs the gap overnight.

4. Making the most of batteries

For Electric Match customers with batteries, we can use these to increase matching on an intraday basis.

Take the example below. This shows levels of carbon-free electricity available over a few summer weeks versus the energy that users consume. Each day there are periods where the customer uses more electricity than their matched assets are generating, and also periods where the opposite is true.

Batteries would take this customer closer to 24/7 matching. They can stock up on carbon-free electricity when their assets are generating and use this at times where they need more green electrons.

What are the next steps for businesses to achieve 24/7 carbon-free electricity?

We’re excited to push ever closer to 100% matching and we’re exploring emerging technologies that can help us to get there.

Let’s bring this to life with an example.

The graph below shows renewable generation and business consumption over a series of days. The start of the period is gusty, which builds up a surplus of clean power. But then, the wind subsides and grey stillness takes hold. There follows a series of consecutive days where the business uses more electricity than can be generated by renewables.

This is at the heart of the 24/7 clean energy challenge that we’re looking ahead to overcome.

There are two opportunities to develop here: multi-day storage and consistent renewable generation.

Multi-day battery storage
Shorter-duration (intraday) storage has already scaled through lithium-ion batteries. And we’re looking ahead to see the same for longer durations. In the example above, this could use the surplus generation from the start of the period to cover deficits later on.

There’s progress with different types of batteries involving metal air, nickel hydrogen, liquid metal and sodium sulphur. But none of them has quite provided the perfect solution just yet.

Consistent renewable generation
Solar and wind energy create a strong foundation upon which we can layer other types of generation.

Supplementing this with ‘always-on’ forms of clean power would reduce the chance of consistent deficits - and make higher matching possible. We already use run-of-river hydropower to increase matching. And are looking towards the scaling of existing and new technologies in this space too, like geothermal generation.