WINTER CASHBACK! It’s back again.

For anyone new to Winter Cashback, basically, this is a scheme where you earn money for powering down or not using electricity for a certain hour (an hour and a half maximum) when notified. If you use less than your average, you get paid based on the formula below.  There are at least 12 events over the winter, and you can participate in as many as you want.

The Electricity Systems Operator (“ESO“) will be rerunning another Demand Flexibility Service (“Winter Cashback”) this winter from around 1 November 2023 onwards.  Please read our terms and conditions here about the scheme here.  Details of the parent scheme can be found on the ESO website here.

The Charging Methodology can also be found in this PDF here. (see Appendix 5).  Please note you can only sign up for 1 scheme. So if you sign up with your supplier and Hugo, for example, you will only get paid by the scheme you most recently signed up to.  As last year, payments will be split 80% to Hugo’s user and 20% to Hugo.

Once again, we are ready to support the scheme via the Hugo Energy App.

Very much like last winter, we will have 2 buttons in Hugo’s settings. Go to SETTINGS (Top right corner) > Turn on Winter Cashback Registration.

• One to register on the scheme
• One to participate in a live event.

The registration button will be activated all winter, and you can turn this on once and keep it on.

The participation toggle button will be activated when an event is announced, and we will notify you via an in-app message and email.

How Will the Cashback Be Calculated?

The proposed cashback calculation this year has been changed, and here is our simple analysis below.  See the PDF above for a detailed explanation of this and the export calculation.

Now, if a cashback event occurs on 6th November 2023 between 6-7 p.m., the average baseline will be your 6-7 p.m. usage on the previous 10 working days and 4 non-working days.  See the Table below as a working example based on the last 10 days:

Event: 6th November, 6-7 pm

Price £3 per kWh saved

Please note, however, that the calculations will exclude weekends.  So, in the example below, 28/29 October and 4/5 November would be replaced with 17-20 October days.  For the exact formula, please see Baseline Calculation in Appendix 5 in the PDF above.

The total usage leading up to the event = 13.89

Divide by 10 to get the average.

= 1.389

On the 6^th of November, between 6-7 p.m. during the Winter Cashback event, you used 0.2 kWh. Then, this was deducted from the average as follows:

1.389 – 0.2

= 1.189

So, the total saving is 1.189 kWh

Assuming that the Cashback amount for this event is £3. We would work out the savings as follows:

£3 1.189 = £3.567

So, this user would receive £3.567 for this event.

As last year, we will make payments at the end of winter via the PayPal email you designate in the app, or we will donate the savings to the FuelBank Foundation.  Last year, we raised over £5,000 for the FuelBank Foundation, supporting over 200 families in fuel poverty.

As an added incentive, we will give prizes from the Hugo’s Gift Shop to selected super savers. We will announce the exact terms closer to the end of the month.

Export Incentives

If you have domestic battery storage and can export during an event, you can get additional Winter Cashback payments.

However, this depends on you having an export MPAN whose data we can access. We cannot always access the export data as the MPAN may not be configured correctly to view it on our system. So, if you are interested in using Hugo for this service, please message us via the app and choose the title Winter Cashback Query.

In the text, say something like:

Please confirm if my export MPAN data is available.

We will try to confirm within 24 hours. If it is unavailable, ask your supplier if they provide this service during an event or ask them if they can make the export data available on the open network.  We can assist you with a letter template to help with this process.  If you can’t participate in the Export incentive, you can still participate in the main scheme.

Finally, we will notify you about Winter Cashback events via in-app Notifications Email, and we will announce Events on X (Formerly Twitter) – so please follow us on Twitter if you don’t already via this link.