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In the current cost-of-living crisis, if someone told the average householder that their energy company was going to start paying them rather than the other way around, they would assume you had lost the plot.
But that is exactly what Utilita is planning to do, in an industry first for prepayment customers. What’s more, it also will help customers be greener and help Utilita and the country meet some exacting targets for reducing carbon emissions.
We haven’t lost the plot at all and this graph shows why. It shows the average cost of electricity at different times of an average day.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-253 size-large" src="https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-1024x496.png" alt="" width="1024" height="496" srcset="https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-1024x496.png 1024w, https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-300x145.png 300w, https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-768x372.png 768w, https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-1536x744.png 1536w, https://cms.procode.technology/app/uploads/2024/06/p_b_b3_g1-2048x992.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
Electricity prices fluctuate throughout the day and year according to supply and demand. If it is sunny or windy, there is lots of renewable energy available, driving prices down. When one of our national sports teams is in a big final, electricity is more in demand and prices are pushed up. There are particular times of day that are more expensive too – typically the evenings when people finish work, turn on the television and the oven.
What that graph shows is that if we can encourage people to change their energy habits – by using energy at different times of the day &#8211; we can help them save money.
This is the principle behind Utilita’s Power Payback scheme.
Power Payback is being trialled by up to 1,500 households during November. Utilita customers will receive an SMS notification one hour before each ‘payback’ event, of which there will be one per week. Should the customer avoid usage during the payback event, which will normally be between 5.30pm and 10.30pm, they will receive energy credits equivalent to the cost savings.
That trial will help us see just how sensitive people are to the price of their energy. We are not asking them to go with essential heating or cooking but asking them to make smart choices, perhaps charging their electronic devices at different times of the day, for example.
The messages the customers on the trial might receive might be a suggestion to put their washing on at a different time or to check to see whether anything is on standby that could be safely switched off. Utilita’s Power Payback trial will not only help the sustainability team to understand customers’ willingness to reduce their usage during peak times to save money, but they will also be focussing on whether customers have a choice to avoid usage during peak times, which may not always be an option. For this reason the trial will look specifically at the times of day that the Power Payback event takes place, and the day of the week. The duration of Power Payback events will also be trialled to identify whether shorter periods are easier to make savings within, compared to longer periods.
In the future, the messaging in the Power Payback scheme might tap into the world of behavioural psychology. The biggest influence is when you compare people with others they have things in common with: someone that lives in the same area or has a similar size family. We can use that to encourage greener behaviour that will also save them money.
This switching will help boost customers’ use of green energy. Green energy is generally cheaper just because the power stations and installations generating it generally do not require feeding with expensive raw materials once they are set up.
Electricity generated by onshore wind farms is cheapest followed by solar farms followed by offshore wind. It is all about the capital investment – once the means of generating it have been built and the capital investment made, there are no fuel costs. At a time when oil and gas are rocketing in price because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, renewable energy looks cheaper than ever.
If the trial is successful and all our customers embraced the Power Payback scheme, we could save our customers up to £61.2 million a year and save the equivalent amount of carbon emissions from driving 600,000 miles. That carbon saving is just over seven percent of last year’s total Utilita carbon footprint. At the moment we aim to reduce our carbon footprint by a little over nine percent a year to meet our net zero targets, so that is a great potential contribution.
Power Payback will help Utilita and its customers go green. Our target of achieving net zero by 2030 is the most ambitious target in the industry.
We are targeting emissions by replacing our fleet of diesel vans with electric vehicles, looking at the energy use in our buildings, water usage and the waste we produce.
Yet the reality is that 99 percent of our emissions come from the electricity our customers use and so we have to decarbonise that energy use. Traditionally, this has been achieved through carbon offsets but that needs to change. We have to supply more renewable electricity, greener gas or help customers to reduce the amount of gas they use.
We are promoting schemes like Power Payback because it is the right thing to do on so many levels.
Customers save money and we reduce the nation’s carbon footprint. We also keep our costs down through being an efficient business, producing the same or better output with fewer resources. It means that customers are more likely to choose our products and services. This environmentally and socially conscious element of the business also means staff are more likely to choose us to work for and to stay with us.
Is net zero achievable by 2030?
There is a long way to go and it requires a fundamental shift in how we produce our energy and how we purchase it. Make no mistake it is challenging but sometimes the hardest things are the most rewarding. And with our new Power Payback trial, it looks set to be very rewarding for our customers.

Illustration of a Procode team member analysing business energy data, representing Procode's energy data management solutions.

Why going green pays

<a href="https://utilita.co.uk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Utilita</a> may be an energy company, but technology is at the heart of what we do. We see ourselves – and Procode – more as an energy tech company, the same way that Uber is a technology company that delivers best-in-class ground transportation services and Amazon is a tech giant that is also the leading online retailer.
Great technology businesses need great technology leaders and Utilita is no exception.
Ian Burgess joined Utilita in 2019 and is now the company’s Chief Technology Officer. In each of the three years since joining, Ian has been named in the CIO 100, which recognise “the most transformational and disruptive [chief information officers] in and from the UK”. In 2022, Ian was placed at 18th in the ranking, the highest position of any of the challenger brands aiming to disrupt the Big Six’s stranglehold on the energy market.
Ian says the awards are not about technology for the sake of technology. All those in the hundred-strong list see themselves as business leaders rather than technology leaders.
“The CIO 100 acknowledges the place that tech plays in every business,” Ian says.
Ian has spent his career working for businesses that are at the bleeding edge of technology, including online bookmaker Betfair, the travel management company Carlson Wagonlit and the car rental company Avis Budget Group.
Another of Ian’s previous roles is going to prove vital in the new innovative world that energy is moving into, thanks to the green transition and the widespread adoption of smart meters. The energy it is becoming is an industry in which a fast response to huge volumes of data is going to be critical, something that Ian knew well in his role as infrastructure manager for McLaren Racing. While at the Formula One team, when a young Lewis Hamilton was beginning to make his mark on the world stage, Ian was responsible for all aspects of IT management, including strategies, systems, IT services and infrastructure.
“Formula One is always about being on the bleeding edge,” says Ian. “It is data driven and if you can do something that can save you a tenth of a second on a lap or make your systems a few per cent more reliable, that is the difference between winning and losing.”
Smart meters – Utilita installed the first one in Britain in 2005 – means that trillions of pieces of information will be available to help consumers and business customers make better choices about their energy usage and will help energy retailers optimise supply and demand, helping Britain meet its environmental targets and consumers and businesses reduce their bills.
It is little different to the world of Formula One where thousands of pieces of information about how elements of high-performance engines and other car components are functioning need to be analysed and acted upon in real-time.
In the world of energy, technology can help make similarly split-second decisions.
Our domestic customers can use our <a href="https://utilita.co.uk/my-utilita/faqs?#smart-score" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Smart Score</a> app to monitor their energy usage in real-time and make sensible decisions on when and how to use their appliances to save money.
Shippers who use Procode’s Gas Shipping Platform can see how the changing weather is going to affect supply and demand, allowing them to better optimise their operations.
Behind it all is the innovative technology that sets Utilita and Procode apart and have seen Ian named in the CIO 100.
So, the next time you are watching the action from Monaco or Monza, it’s worth remembering that Ian is driving the change at Utilita and Procode.

Illustration of a person using a laptop to discover ways to leverage smart meter data through Procode technology.

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Why going green pays

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