British Gas Launches Summer Sundays

23 June 2023

British Gas

Media Relations

Enjoy a Sunday roast with extra trimmings...to your electricity bill:

British Gas is bringing savings to the nation’s summer with half price electricity every Sunday through its PeakSave scheme, with customers’ total savings from the scheme expected to reach up to £5 million by the end of September.

Customers will be rewarded with 50 per cent off all electricity between 11am and 4pm every Sunday from 25^th June to 24^th September. The discount is available to new and existing PeakSave customers, and all savings will appear as a credit on customers’ energy bills.

"The electricity grid continues to face enormous pressures and we recognise the need to better manage periods of peak demand to ensure a safe, constant and more sustainable supply across the UK. Since launching PeakSave last year, we have gained valuable insight on how we can control periods of high demand on the grid, while helping our customers to make significant savings."

Catherine O’Kelly, Managing Director of British Gas Energy at British Gas

PeakSave began as part of the National Grid’s Demand Flexibility Service, which tests how to manage consumption to support a greener energy supply. Typically, there is a greater amount of renewables available in the UK’s energy system on a Sunday because of lower demand from business and industry, which reduces the requirement for energy generated by fossil fuels. British Gas Summer Sundays is encouraging the use of this greener energy as well as helping customers save money.

New research* has revealed that Sunday is already a big day for household energy use, with two fifths of consumers saying they use more electricity on Sundays compared with any other day of the week to carry out household chores and enjoy home comforts. The most popular Sunday activities include drinking lots of tea and coffee (58%), cooking a Sunday roast (45%), getting the household chores done like washing clothes (59%) and hoovering (48%) and catching up on television programmes (33%).

There is no obligation to shift your normal activities on the scheme but households can save more by doing more energy intensive tasks on a Sunday. Savings** for a household across the whole summer could include:

Household activity	£ savings across 14 Sundays
Watching television	£1.27
Drinking x10 cups of tea/coffee	£0.99
Two hours using electric oven	£8.90
One hour using electric hob	£4.24
One hour spent vacuuming	£2.97
One hour using washing machine	£4.52
One hour using tumble dryer	£5.37
Two hours playing video games	£0.99
Total	£29.25

Catherine O’Kelly, Managing Director of British Gas Energy at British Gas, said: “We look forward to welcoming even more customers to the PeakSave scheme and helping them make savings on their bills this summer.

“The electricity grid continues to face enormous pressures and we recognise the need to better manage periods of peak demand to ensure a safe, constant and more sustainable supply across the UK. Since launching PeakSave last year, we have gained valuable insight on how we can control periods of high demand on the grid, while helping our customers to make significant savings.

“We want to increase the number of customers who have signed up to the scheme so we can understand its true potential and achieve a greener and more controlled grid.”

British Gas customers wishing to find out more and take part in PeakSave can sign up here: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/peak-save.html

NOTES

About British Gas:

British Gas is Britain’s leading supplier of energy and services and the country’s biggest retailer of zero carbon electricity. We are part of Centrica, a company founded on a 200-year heritage of serving people. We provide energy and services to over 7 million UK homes and businesses, supported by around 7,500 highly trained engineers and technicians. We also offer a range of innovative products and services, including Hive and our on-demand digital trades service, Local Heroes. Our purpose of helping Our purpose of helping customers live sustainably, simply and affordably drives our strategy and our People and Planet Plan.

About PeakSave:

British Gas ran a trial energy reduction scheme for this winter called ‘PeakSave’ that took part in the National Grid ESO service trials. The trial tested the potential for reducing demand on the grid whilst helping customers save on bills by asking households to reduce their usage during National Grid’s ‘turn-down’ events. The initial scheme trial ran between 1^st December 2022 and 31^st March 2023 and now British Gas is launching new products to test the potential to save on bills and shift demand.

In the original trial, British Gas revealed its customers received a combined total of more than £1.8 million and saved 147 MWh of energy – enough to power 750,000 homes for an hour. The savings to date equate to an average of £28.56 per customer. The PeakSave scheme could pass on up to £5 million in savings to customers by end of September from the winter scheme, April’s Summer Sunday and the upcoming Summer Sundays.

*Research undertaken by OnePoll across 2,000 adults w/c 12 June 2023

** Illustrative example based on a household completing all household tasks for 14 weeks every Sunday and actual savings will depend on usage.