Short Notice of Power Move Flex Events

It would be useful if the National Grid could get together with our electricity suppliers and develop an app for this. It could send notifications, then more people (including me!) could see an event was coming up. I don’t read my emails frequently enough throughout the day either and I missed a half price Octopus event for charging the car last Sunday night. Read the email Monday morning 🤦🏼‍♀️

What model of phone do you have ​@dliou2005? We can help guide you in how to set up calender reinders 🙂

Thanks for your insight here ​@Blastoise186 and ​@Peter E.

​@juliamc an app is a great idea! It’d be so helpful in this situation.

​@juliamc An app would be good in terms of timely notifications but that's not the only issue. It's also a question of if you have any discretionary loads of the right size. A known load that you have ready to go but happy to postpone indefinitely if there are no ‘free hours’ available at the moment. If at any time you have to ‘use’ that load then it's probably not available now should a free hour suddenly materialize.

Also, you have to use the free kWh within an hour meaning that the load has to be at least one kW or half an hour for a 2kW load etc. The problem there is if you switch on the oven it takes about 2.5kW for about 10-15 minutes depending on the temperature and then switches on and off intermittently. How on earth are you supposed to work out what's been used unless you have a 1kW electric heater running for an hour.

Given the size of the reward I don't think people know how they benefit from this and will probably get tired of trying to make the effort. Something that the NESO are currently finding out and it's the same in other countries.

Peter

Last year Octopus sent Updates via WhatsApp to say there were Saving Sessions that day. I think I was able to use one of them. From my point of view it’s not about the financial reward so much as helping balance the grid. I could get the vacuum cleaner going at short notice (if I was at home).

The NESO can always balance the grid through the existing Balancing Mechanism which works perfectly well by paying existing generators to move to a hot standby condition (subject to minimum inertia constraints) and by negotiating interconnector power from the continent.

https://www.neso.energy/what-we-do/systems-operations/what-balancing-mechanism

They are just seeing if they can find a cheaper way of doing it but there isn't a lot of money available to do that. The current BM isn't expensive but they are trying to head off the inevitable increase in energy costs due to Net Zero because that is politically disastrous.

I've just looked at my records and the capped price this quarter is nearly 4p higher than the same quarter last year.

Peter 

iPhone 11 pro max

Hey ​@dliou2005,

Just found a handy online article about adding events to an iPhone calendar. I've asked the team to think about adding a reminder feature down the road. They're looking into it, so keep an eye out for updates!
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https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3d110f84/ios

Hopefully this helps 

The Beyond rewards people seem to have worked out how to do it with their free electricity slots. It’s a 1-click method to add to the calendar of choice, here in my Android 15 phone:
  

Once done, this is what I see in Outlook:
  

  
Then it’s up to me to work out how to set up an alert for the event. That’s the part that has me scrabbling, I’m afraid.

As the Power Move Flex participants appear to be getting as little as 2-hours notice then is adding it to the calendar for 2-hours later going to be that useful?