Saving Sessions

This year, to join Saving Sessions you have to be part of Octoplus, our customer rewards scheme, and you need to have a Direct Debit set up or be on smart prepay.

The only way you can join Saving Sessions is with an electricity smart meter that sends regular half-hourly readings. This is essential, because we use your smart readings to measure what you save during Sessions and to calculate your typical energy use.

Local Power ups (like the ones in the East and Midlands) aren’t changing for now. We’ll keep inviting you to these separately, and your rewards will stay the same.

Longer term, our mission is to make it super easy to get involved and get rewarded for shifting power – so you’ll just ‘Power up’ or ‘Power down’, without needing to join different types of session (like Free Electricity for example). That’s still a little way off though. We'll be in touch if anything changes.

If you're part of Octopus but haven't signed up to Saving Sessions yet, log in to your online account or app – you should see a banner with an option to join the campaign.

Once you've done that, you'll start receiving emails to join each session. Remember to opt in to each session otherwise you won't receive Octopoints for taking part.

With energy prices still higher than historic levels, it's never been more important to help people save power and money. But Saving Sessions isn't just a way of easing the impact of the energy crisis on your bills - it's the start of a new era of energy: one where people genuinely benefit by actively participating in making energy smarter, greener and cheaper. Currently, the UK often has to fire up extra fossil-fuel run power stations to satisfy everyone's energy needs at the busiest times of day.

Rather than paying these (very expensive) fossil fuel generators to turn on, when demand is high, we want to reward people for switching off or delaying the energy they don't need. Not only will this cut carbon emissions – it helps balance the energy system, and allows us to make the most of green energy when the sun's shining and the wind's blowing.

You'll get an email invitation to opt in to every Saving Session in your region (as long as you haven't unsubscribed from our comms). They'll be sent with as much notice as possible. You may also see a pop up banner in your Octopus app which you can also use to opt in. Download the app and learn how to turn on notifications.

You'll need a working electric smart meter so we can verify how much energy you've managed to save.

If you haven't got one, you can request one on our website. Once it's installed, you can then join Octoplus and access Saving Sessions.

In Britain, there are a number of services and markets designed to help manage the grid by rewarding industry for using more and less energy. Saving Sessions is our way to bring those services to customers.

'Power Down' Saving Sessions are run as part of NESO's Demand Flexibility Service (DFS). The DFS pays for your reward and when you sign up to Saving Sessions, we'll enrol you with this service.

Our local Power-ups for customers who live in certain postcodes (mostly in the East and Midlands) are part of flexibility schemes run by local network operators. We currently partner with UKPN, NGED and NPG. Power-ups in Scotland is made possible by NESO's Local Constraint Market.

One thing to note: some of these services have rules that say you can't be enrolled through multiple suppliers.

You don’t really need to worry about this — the vast majority of customers won’t be enrolled in multiple, and if you do need to choose between two we’ll reach out and let you know.

It's hard to say for sure — the total number will largely depend on how much help the service operator need at any given time, but we're hoping for lots!