Ready for the Power Move summer challenge?

Despite what OVO says, they have made the Summer targets tougher than Spring, and hidden it by including weekends!

If you had absolutely flat hourly energy consumption in Spring , 12.5% of your elec would be peak which would just scrape into Level 2 payout 

If you are flat in July it would be 9.27% which doesn’t even hit Level3! Slightly improvement to 8.75% in Sept but still misses Level3

Come on OVO , don’t take us for mugs - at least admit you’ve made it harder…

Of course they have made it harder.

The idea of a Challenge is to, err, challenge you.

A target that that is easy to attain isn’t a challenge at all.

Like with many challenges, after a while the bar gets raised and you are going to have to up your game and push yourself that bit more if you want to continue meeting the targets and getting rewarded.
The weekends being included as all off-peak for Summer PM will help, but won’t do it all for you.

There is of course the risk that as they gradually make the PM challenge more difficult to meet then people are just going to drop out if/when they can no longer meet it, and may then go back to their old ‘peak-hour wasteful’ ways.

That’s always going to be a balancing act because if they have made the targets too difficult then people will drop out and are unlikely to try again even if the targets go lower again.

One thing the new regime does is remove the incentive to shift weekend consumption to weekdays. It used to help towards the target if you hoovered or ran the washing machine on Friday evening (after 9)  instead of Saturday morning. That’s no longer the case. Now the only thing that matters is not using power-hungry appliances during the weekday peak periods.

With really low usage and trying really hard keeping everything in off peak that I possibly could and cooking in off peak hrs,  in winter I achieved level 3 throughout, in spring I've done exactly the same and was in level 2 although June I've scraped into level 3. Lasting as long as I could before putting a light on is what made the difference as I dont need it til after 9pm now.

I've just revised the figures to include the weekend data as off peak and with the new targets, April  & May would be level 1 and June  level 2.  It just means what I moved to a weekend I can now do anytime off peak in the week instead but for either £2, or if extremely lucky on the borderline for £5. There is nothing else I can do.

To help keep low users engaged why not have different tiers for low/med/high users? The incentive would be to change brackets thereby using less power, but also give incentive to lower usage within the brackets as well. 

I think that having different bands for different users would be a complication too far.

And working on percentages moved takes your low/medium/heavy use into account anyway

In the end it's about all of us moving as much electricity use as possible out of the peak hours.

Of course heavy users will be able to move more than lighter users - which is why Power Move works on percentage targets rather that just kWh moved.

It's not how many kWh overall you can move that counts for Power Move but how much of you ‘normal’ use that you have shifted.

The very different Power Move Plus and Power Move Flex schemes do work on kWh figures not % - so even if a low user can meet those by moving a little bit they will only get little pennies reward for moving that little bit. (Most low users have decided that those two schemes are not worth the extra effort).

This has become completely pointless now if you do not cook on gas. I reduce electricity usage as much as reasonably possible that cooking is one of the larger chunks of my usage. I will not be avoiding cooking for my children after I finish work to try and meet this insane target.

I normally spend a night away every week or two, and when I go away, I switch off my boiler as I won't be using any of it until I get back and then just switch it on for an hour which gives me enough hot water. 

What I didn't realise is that this makes my day completely flat - so the money I save by not putting the boiler cam actually cost me that £10 bonus. 

So now I leave it on, using more energy but not £10 worth... And if a day is flat for another reason, I'll put a wash load on just to make the off peak hours higher in consumption. 

How is this helping the planet?

Yes

I’m achieving the middle power move target purely by charging my PHEV outside peak and making sure it charges on Friday after the cutoff, not Saturday morning, and Monady after 0:00 rather than Sunday evening - i use about 200 KW hours for my car in a month - with the new targets this won’t work as well and I’ll nedd to modify my checking spreadsheet!

I won't be joining this.

Now the parameters have changed, it's not really feasible, especially when they are looking for such a large reduction in usage.

The timings are not compatible with our normal lifestyle. 4 till 7 was manageable but not this.

 The rewards are also too poor to be tempting.

I to use a spreadsheet…

Is it wrong to feel smug?