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Chris_OVO
Community Manager
Community Manager
January 28, 2025
News

Power Move - new challenge information and changes to Power Move

  • January 28, 2025
  • 238 replies
  • 7839 views
Power Move - New challenge information and changes to Power Move

Updated on 14/07/26 by Abby_OVO

 

Hi everyone,

 

In 2024, OVO customers saved over £1.6 million by shifting their energy and making greener choices with Power Move.

 

Ahead of the challenge starting 1 February 2025, we introduced a few changes.

 

 

Power Move prize draw

 

Whilst Power Move will always be about helping you save money on your energy bills and reducing demand on the energy grid, the way it works has changed.

 

Each month, if you use 15% or less of your total electricity during peak times you’ll now earn entries into a monthly prize draw. The number of entries depends on how much electricity you use during peak times. The lower your home’s peak time energy use, the more entries you’ll earn.

 

 

How we calculate your number of entries

 

If you have a peak time electricity usage of 15% or less at the end of the month, you’ll earn entries for the prize draw. 

 

The amount of entries earned will correspond with your end-of-month peak time electricity use percentage as follows:

 

  • 0 to 1% = 15 entries
  • 1.01 to 2% = 14 entries
  • 2.01 to 3% = 13 entries
  • 3.01 to 4% = 12 entries
  • 4.01 to 5% = 11 entries
  • 5.01 to 6% = 10 entries
  • 6.01 to 7% = 9 entries
  • 7.01 to 8% = 8 entries
  • 8.01 to 9% = 7 entries
  • 9.01 to 10% = 6 entries
  • 10.01 to 11% = 5 entries
  • 11.01 to 12% = 4 entries
  • 12.01 to 13% = 3 entries
  • 13.01 to 14% = 2 entries
  • 14.01% to 15% = 1 entry
  • 15.01% or above = 0 entries

 

After each month ends, the number of entries you’ve earned will be automatically entered into a prize draw, along with all the entries of other customers who’ve earned entries in that month.

 

 

The prizes

 

A minimum of 5 customers each month will win up to a year’s worth of free energy*, with a range of other bill credit prizes also available to win. There’ll be a minimum of 10,000 prizes available every month.

 

You can see what prizes are being offered in the Power Move section of your OVO app and on ovoenergy.com/power-move at the beginning of each new month. 

 

If you’re a winner you’ll be notified in the Power Move section of the app. Customers can win one prize per month.


 

Changes to peak times

 

We've heard your feedback that it can feel difficult to shift your home’s energy use during the current window of 4-7pm. From 1 February 2025, peak times changed to 5pm-7pm, Monday - Friday

 

Weekend usage is still counted as off-peak.

 

 

Updates via the OVO app

 

You'll be able to see your progress through the app. When the new challenge is live, sign in to your account and select 'Power Move' on the home screen.

 

Here, you’ll have a progress dashboard to track how you’re getting on, and see if you’ve won a prize at the end of the month.

 

For more information, visit ovoenergy.com/power-move, our Power Move FAQs and Power Move terms and conditions.

 

*A year’s free energy is set at a maximum bill credit of £2,000. A year’s free energy is calculated in line with Ofgem’s average Energy Price Cap for January-March 2025 for customers paying by Direct Debit, which is worked out based on a 2-3 bedroom house, with 2 to 3 occupants using the average domestic usage in electricity per year. Credit may not equal one year’s free energy if you are a higher than average user or if the price cap were to increase beyond current forecasts. We’ll pay it as energy bill credit in 12 monthly instalments. For example, if you win a year's free energy in January, the credit would be applied to your bill in February and each following month up to the last payment in January the following year.

238 replies

Blastoise186
Super User
Super User
January 29, 2025

Sorry to be a pain, but if you’d like to continue the discussion on the balancing and settlement stuff, would you mind dropping it into a new thread for us? It’s a cool discussion that I’m totally up for being part of, it’s just that I’d rather keep this one focused on Power Move itself so that we don’t make things too confused. I can even have your comments moved over if that helps - just ask!

Thanks for understanding

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Blastoise186
Super User
Super User
January 29, 2025

 

Actually, I’ve had messages from some folks who say they do want a lottery and are cool with the changes - they just didn’t want to say so publicly and wish to remain anonymous for fear of getting blasted over it

 

The people who “prefer a lottery” clearly haven’t actually worked out what the odds are and don’t realise that their average probable reward for power moving will drop from £10-15 a month to less than 10p on average. They’re being conned by the apparent illusion that they stand a fair chance of winning £2000 or £125, which they don’t. Do the sums. (See the bottom of page 1 of this thread).

 

OVO make money out of us power moving, a huge amount of money, due to the differences of the cost of wholesale electricity at different times of the day. They’re just deciding that they’re no longer going to allow us to get any reward for helping them save money. Fine, if that is OVO’s new way, then I don’t power move any more, I have my oven on at peak time and get my dinner at a normal time again.

 

The Power Move team did see your maths - they mentioned it to me as somehow I missed that.

However, I see a bit of a flaw with them. I can tell you now that there’s actually a lot more than 2 million customers on OVO’s books and waaaaay less than 1 million active Power Move players. The odds of winning are therefore much higher than your figures suggest.

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Rank 2
January 29, 2025

Supporting those who are vulnerable takes priority over stuff like Power Move

Sorry, my question is not relevant to this topic. I’m just personally interested how OVO helps vulnerable people? This is not a discussion, it’s for my personal knowledge.

Newcomer
January 29, 2025

The reason I describe how the market operates was in response to your comment

quote

I will also mention that the idea of Power Move never has been about having OVO save money. If it was, then they’ve absolutely failed at that goal. As a “Loss Leader” type thing, it’ll never make money by itself and can only act as a way to attract customers into buying other products that do make a profit. Hence why supermarkets sell milk so cheap - they deliberately make a loss on it to get you into the store and make up the losses on everything else.

end quote

Power move is “not a loss leader” it is good economics and attempts to flatten peak demand 

Rank 5
January 29, 2025

 

Actually, I’ve had messages from some folks who say they do want a lottery and are cool with the changes - they just didn’t want to say so publicly and wish to remain anonymous for fear of getting blasted over it

 

The people who “prefer a lottery” clearly haven’t actually worked out what the odds are and don’t realise that their average probable reward for power moving will drop from £10-15 a month to less than 10p on average. They’re being conned by the apparent illusion that they stand a fair chance of winning £2000 or £125, which they don’t. Do the sums. (See the bottom of page 1 of this thread).

 

OVO make money out of us power moving, a huge amount of money, due to the differences of the cost of wholesale electricity at different times of the day. They’re just deciding that they’re no longer going to allow us to get any reward for helping them save money. Fine, if that is OVO’s new way, then I don’t power move any more, I have my oven on at peak time and get my dinner at a normal time again.

 

The Power Move team did see your maths - they mentioned it to me as somehow I missed that.

However, I see a bit of a flaw with them. I can tell you now that there’s actually a lot more than 2 million customers on OVO’s books and waaaaay less than 1 million active Power Move players. The odds of winning are therefore much higher than your figures suggest.

Regarding numbers, this is why I worked out based on how much OVO paid out. 

They said £1.6m over 2024. 

If everyone got the max amount (£144/yr) - 11,111 users. 

If everyone was on £3/m, (£36/yr) - 44,444 users 

The thread is getting derailed and its reminding me of forums as a teenager.

Good luck to those who like a lottery. 

Rank 5
January 29, 2025

Thinking of enrolled users and OVO’s income from this user base. Using price cap of £1738/yr

Based on 11,111 users - £19.3m

Based on 44,444 users - £77.2m

So, I would be interested to see how many people are enrolled out of the 4 million users. 

Based on price cap, that’s an income of £6,952,000,000/yr- (£579,333,333/month)

So, running a lottery worth £52k/month is really going to trouble the bean counters. 

Also, remember that its no more than 1% of OVO’s customer base who are enrolled in this, so its not worth their time/effort. The other 99% of users will complain about the 1% getting free money paid for by their bills. 

Blastoise186
Super User
Super User
January 29, 2025

Supporting those who are vulnerable takes priority over stuff like Power Move

Sorry, my question is not relevant to this topic. I’m just personally interested how OVO helps vulnerable people? This is not a discussion, it’s for my personal knowledge.

Sure. Some of the options on the table include extra support with bills (if you need it), upcoming power outage alerts, priority power restoration and potentially having all contact with OVO redirected to the Priority Support Team (which often means super-fast response times on Phone/Live Chat and more pro-active account monitoring, among other things)*.

The circumstances you mentioned to me do also qualify, so feel free to check out https://www.ovoenergy.com/help/article/priority-services-register and sign up via https://www.ovoenergy.com/register-for-priority-services .

I open up this offer not just to Costeek, but to anyone who feels this service may help. All I ask is please use the two links above as I can’t process those applications myself. I admit it might not help replace what Power Move V1 did, but if you were relying on PM to keep on top of bills, then you may be able to make use of it anyway. You can of course choose to decline this offer and that’s OK too - it’s always open if you change your mind later.

*Apologies, but that last feature doesn’t work on the OVO Forum because we don’t have a way to know. But you can still let the Forum Moderators know of any such circumstances and request reasonable adjustments to help improve your experience here, simply ping them an email via forum@ovoenergy.com and they’ll have a chat with you.

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Firedog
Super User
Super User
January 30, 2025

… according to NESO, OVO is not taking part in DFS this year
 

So sorry 🤷‍♂️. You’re quite right that OVO isn’t taking part in ‘the’ NESO DFS. CrowdFlex is also ‘a’ demand flexibility service run by NESO for Ofgem. Same idea, same aims, slightly different methods. We’re apparently halfway through the current trial: https://www.neso.energy/document/352246/download 

  

if we would have the same demand as in 2022, we would have energy price the same high, wouldn’t we?  
 

Demand in 2022 was indeed higher than before following the relaxation of COVID restrictions. However, this coincided with supply uncertainty following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, leading to the price hikes we all suffered from. The need for flexibility now arises in part from phenomena like anticyclonic gloom (when both solar and wind power generation are at their lowest) and from the closing down of Britain’s last coal-fired power station. There was no danger of a blackout on 8 January, because extra capacity was available and was made available in time. That may not always be the case. But the more we can do to reduce the amount of fossil fuel burnt to generate electricity, the better for all of us.

 

I don’t think this discussion is too far off-topic; it’s as well to understand why schemes like Power Move and Power Move Flex exist. Many participants regard them simply as ways to reduce their bills, which IMO is rather missing the point. 

 

Noel | I have no official status; I'm just a volunteer who comes here to help other customers. My gear: Aclara SGM 1416-B Electricity-only E7 meter; Chameleon IHD3-PPMID-AAA | It may look as if I know what I’m talking about, but don’t let that fool you. |
Blastoise186
Super User
Super User
January 30, 2025

Indeed. If you are/were trying to treat Power Move/Power Move Flex as some kind of Get Rich Quick Scheme, then I’m afraid you’ve totally got the wrong end of the stick - the monetary rewards and/or incentives were never the intention of these schemes in the first place as it was all about shifting consumer behaviour to encourage moving usage out of peak times.

Alas, since most folks won’t do so for free, that’s why the incentives exist - since it’s the only way most people would be inclined to take part.

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Rank 2
January 30, 2025

CrowdFlex is about Power Move Flex, which is different (additional to?) from Power Move. We even have a different forum group for that. But it was interesting to read the report! Thank you for sharing!

If I’m right, PM Flex is more oriented toward those who own EVs. I agree; any contribution is welcomed, as everyone benefits from a better-balanced grid and greener energy. 

When I pointed out that OVO was taking a part in DFS and not anymore, I had a different idea in my head. When I learned about the DFS (I wasn’t aware of the details before this discussion), I realised the following sequence: ESO got nationalised (“became NESO”), DFS T&C got changed, OVO (and some other Big Six energy suppliers) stopped its participation. But I could be wrong, it is pure speculation. However, I can see that those other suppliers continue their DFS-like initiative in the same way even after that. I do not intend to continue this discussion, I think we have already said enough. I’d say that discussion was hot. Though, I don't think that anyone meant PM as the ‘Get Rich Scheme’. It was more the opportunity to reduce the energy bill. And I would guess that many of them don’t own EVs (meaning will not much benefit from PM Flex).