The summer months have drawn to a close and autumn is well on its way - if this weather is anything to go by! That means you might be starting to look ahead to putting your heating on, and energy bills may start to rack up. With that in mind, we're looking at some ways in which you can continue to save money this autumn and beyond.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 We know energy bills are a really significant concern for people. We've been looking into
00:05 ways that households could save money on their energy bill in the future, both in 2025 and
00:12 2030 and out to 2040 as well. The main findings of our research are really that households
00:17 can save money by using electricity much more flexibly, and we can save carbon as well.
00:23 So on a national basis, if we look at 2040, we'd be saving up to £14 billion. On an individual
00:31 basis there are really good savings as well, so up to about £375 in 2040 if you were a
00:38 consumer that had lots of those low carbon technologies installed.
00:43 British households could save billions by switching to flexible electricity initiatives.
00:48 That's according to findings in a new report by Anna Moss, senior consultant at Cornwall
00:52 Insight. She found solutions like time of use tariffs, smart meters, solar PV and batteries
00:58 could mean savings of around £4.6 billion by 2030 and an astounding £14.1 billion by
01:05 2040. But what exactly do we mean by flexible energy initiatives?
01:10 Flexible energy use, we mean increasing, decreasing or changing your consumption to a different
01:15 time of day. So that might be by taking direct action by things like changing when you're
01:21 doing your washing for instance, or changing when you charge your electric vehicle. We're
01:26 talking about making changes that you can make easily without changing things like the
01:32 temperature of your house or making things less convenient for you. And in the future
01:36 we'd expect lots of those changes to become much easier to do, much more automated. It
01:41 might be things like just clicking a button when you're signing up to your energy tariff
01:45 for instance.
01:46 At the moment, the demand for electricity peaks usually between 4 and 7pm during the
01:51 week. To meet this surge in demand, additional fossil fuel generated electricity is often
01:56 required, which drives up wholesale electricity costs and thus impacts consumer bills. With
02:01 the expected surge in electricity demand in the coming years, the importance of transitioning
02:05 to flexible electricity solutions has become even more pronounced according to experts
02:10 like Anna.
02:11 Your in-home display will show you how much electricity and gas you're using in a kind
02:16 of live view. So if you're making changes you should see that change there. And that
02:21 smart meter will also give you access to things like a time of use tariff or a demand flexibility
02:26 service that will give you the rewards for making those changes. Because it means the
02:31 supplier can see when you're using electricity and when you've made that change.
02:36 And an added bonus to the measures being better for our wallets, they're also better for the
02:40 planet too.
02:41 If we look at the kind of savings in 2040 that we've modelled, just by changing the
02:46 way we're using electricity in homes, we think we could save the equivalent of 630,000 trees
02:52 being planted. So there are good carbon savings there. You'd also reduce the need to build
02:58 around four additional power stations to meet that peak in demand that would happen from
03:02 the additional electricity usage.