As Great Britain transitions to a low-carbon electricity system, demand-side flexibility is becoming increasingly important for managing the grid. The Demand Flexibility Service (DFS), introduced by National Grid ESO in 2022, rewards households for reducing electricity use at specified times. This report focuses on the experiences of smart prepayment meter customers participating in the energy supplier Utilita's ‘Power Payback’ DFS offering.

Prepayment customers, who make up around 4 million British households, are more likely to be on low incomes, renting, elderly, or disabled compared to credit customers. Understanding their experiences with flexibility services is crucial for ensuring an inclusive energy transition.

We conducted nine in-depth, online interviews with Utilita customers who had varying levels of engagement with Power Payback. This was complemented by a sentiment analysis of forum posts on the topic of the DFS more generally.

The main findings were as follows:

• Financial savings were the main reason people decided to sign up, and they were generally happy even with low levels of savings (from less than a pound to nearly ten pounds overall) – there was a genuine sense that ‘every little helps’.
• Participants also valued the learning opportunities (for themselves and their families), environmental benefits, and the opportunity to disconnect from routine.
• People employed a range of actions to respond to DFS events (when they were asked to reduce consumption), with most turning off appliances, some shifting cooking times, and one turning off power for their whole home.
• The presence of children and other caring responsibilities significantly influenced the ability to respond flexibly to events, mainly out of concern for disrupting schedules and routines around school and bedtimes.
• However, due to their generally higher electricity use, larger households were able to make larger savings if they were able to shift.
• Participants generally showed low levels of awareness about the underlying reasons for the DFS.
• Views on flexibility products expected to become more common in future (like time of use tariffs) were mixed, with concerns about switching to unfamiliar products, and disruption to family routines.
• While some groups (eg, single occupants and older people) were seen as potentially better able to benefit from flexibility, this wasn't generally viewed as unfair.

Based on the findings, we present a number of provisional personas (or fictionalised consumer representations) to inform our work in this area. These draw on different aspects of people’s experiences, including educating children, exploring an interest in energy, and taking opportunities to disconnect and vary routines. We also map out customer journeys for each of these personas, with initial suggestions for how they could be enhanced.

We suggest three main areas that should be prioritised for future focus:

1. Promoting awareness: Given the low levels of flexibility that many prepayment customers can currently provide, at this stage in the low-carbon transition a greater emphasis should be placed on ways of effectively building awareness and understanding of the need for flexibility. We believe this will be important in expanding and accelerating participation in future flexibility services.
2. Recognising reliability: Where households do show the potential to provide larger responses, we need to develop mechanisms to help them increase the reliability with which they may be able to respond. Reliability increases the overall value of flexibility for both the system and, if it is appropriately recognised, households.
3. Building flexibility capital: We need to explore ways to increase the capacity to provide flexibility for a broader range of households, including through innovative business models and potential regulatory changes. Getting more flexibility, from a diverse range of sources, sooner, is likely to be key to enabling a quicker and more economical low-carbon transition.