Power Move - new challenge information and changes to Power Move

​@huevo to appeal content removal, please email forum@ovoenergy.com .

I can’t help you with that - I don’t have ModPowers.

Exactly. Some people are saying that OVO don’t make any money by getting us to shift power, and that’s rubbish. OVO have to buy the power on the market, in order to sell it to us. They buy some of it months or weeks ahead, some days ahead, some hours ahead, and some has to be resolved after the actual demands have occurred. This is all through the “balancing mechanism”.
So OVO has to pay much more for electricity that we use at peak times on a weekday. Hence, if OVO convinces us all to shift power out of that time period into other time periods, OVO spends a lot less on buying that energy.

The £10, £12, £15 payments for the “old” power move scheme were a way of passing some of that cost saving on to us. To be honest, the payment should have been probably more than £15 for some users, and based on a much more transparent and fair system based on “Time Of Use” and actually how much you used, not just the proportion of energy used within a set window.

In the “new” power move system, my reward would be, on average, between 2p and 9p a month (I did the calculations which are at the bottom of page 1 of this thread). Meanwhile OVO would be saving a LOT of money by me shifting power. I’m not prepared to allow OVO to make tremendous reductions in their costs, when they’re only prepared to pass on 2-9p a month of those costs savings to me.

Other suppliers are offering substantial discounts for “Time Of Use” now, like ½ price electricity at weekends. Might be time to switch supplier!

Time of Use is cool… Until it isn’t when you get stung. It’s not always the right choice because if it hits the Max Limiter Cap, you can end up paying FAR more than you would otherwise.

It is worth remembering also, that the cost of buying the energy from the grid isn’t the only thing OVO has to pay for… Sure, this Forum isn’t cheap to run but the cost savings massively outweigh the money spent on it and creates a massive use case that more than convinces the bosses to let it stay active. I’m not sure I am allowed to share the numbers but the amount of cost saving that comes from having the Forum is a very, very big figure. Unlike the Forum however, Power Move doesn’t have that privilege and the team behind it has to work a LOT harder to justify spending any money at all on it.

But then you’ve got all the other stuff...

​@GrumpyTrucker it appears that I may have missed one of your comments. I had a warning from a tool I use that indicated as such so my apologies for that.

As I mentioned earlier, Power Move is fully self-funded by OVO and there’s no upstream pot they can pull from to replenish or reimburse OVO for whatever rewards they dish out - it comes directly from OVO’s own bank accounts. I think Power Move Flex might be getting some kind of reimbursement as part of the upstream CrowdFlex Trial but I don’t know for sure (don’t rely on that being the case either!). But regular Power Move definitely is self-funded by OVO.

The new times make it easier, not harder, and merely chop one hour off of the “Peak” definition but otherwise still fall within the same times as before. I also stand by my view (as do other Forum Volunteers!) that the behaviour you describe is precisely why Power Move exists in the first place. If we don’t change voluntarily, then change may become mandatory. I’d rather not see mandatory load shedding…

In the interests of transparency, there are multiple OVO Staff monitoring this thread and some of them are talking to me behind the scenes. I can’t reveal what those messages are because they’re not for publication but do know that every comment is being read and actionable feedback is being sent to the right teams should it come up.

I also have direct access to the Power Move team. I talk to them a lot so if I spot useful stuff being discussed here, you can be sure they’ll see it too.

Apologies for the triple comment. I might think about asking a Forum Moderator to help me merge these later, but for now I’ll let them run standalone. If you see two of them disappear - that’s probably why!

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.

If you think about the new system as being “monthly rewards” you’re inevitably going to get wonky maths. Your chances of winning are much higher than the National Lottery and at least ya don’t have to pay to enter so you lose nothing if you don’t win!

On the other hand, you might win £100 on the National Lottery one day… But hang on a sec, you spent £101 on Lottery Tickets and that was your first win so your actual prize is -£1 and you’re still out of pocket…

The Power Move team did want me to mention however, that while the app will let you know whether you won anything from a prize draw, you will still automatically receive any prizes even if you forget to check in. This includes the years free energy one - if you win, it’s automatically delivered with no action required on your part.

Bad idea. Much prefer real account credits rather than fantasy “prizes”.  Disappointed in Ovo.

People don’t want a lottery, that’s the main message. People are not interested in playing games. They want to collaborate in achieving an actual goal. An abstract idea doesn’t work for that. 

Also, it’s all sounds like it’s hard for OVO to carry on, so let’s understand and support them. From the information I can find online, OVO’s revenues are growing. In other words, they do a successful business. Also, this year it’s not the only of the Big Six energy suppliers who doesn’t participate in DFS. Do the other ones makes the same changes? It’s if we want to compare, but I would focus on this company as we are this company’s customers. 

One more thing. DFS was introduced when we had an energy crisis. On that time the possibility of blackouts was hight. It’s not like that these days. 

OVO’s Power Move Flex is very active, part of the CrowdFlex trial under NESO’s DFS. 

If you look at my reply to ​@GrumpyTrucker yesterday, you’ll see a NESO warning from a couple of weeks ago about a predicted excess of demand over supply starting at 16:30 that day. It’s certainly still ‘like that these days’.

The 8th  January  it came real close to load shedding. Between 15:00 and 18:30 reflected by the high price charged per MwH

Time      Settlement Period   Price/MwH

15:00               33                    £2900  <------

18:30              38                     £2900  <------

by 22:30 price  per MwH dropped to £130 MwH

IMHO the previous Power Move was not a loss leader. But good economics to move demand to a period of low price per MwH.

Keep in mind the price charged to consumer does not, to a great extent vary hour by hour. There is one supplier who does. I believe for a short preiod of time they capped their rate at £1 per KwH. I personally go for fixed price KwH for 2 years.

If and quite rightly demand can be moved outwith the peak to lower price per MwH. That is no bad thing

I made a comment regarding the period you mention noting how high the cost per MwH reached. I received a message it was be reviewed before being published.

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