Shaping the future: npower Business Solutions begins the transition to Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement for I&C customers

As E.ON Next continues to lead the way in migrating residential and SME electricity customers to Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement (MHHS), enabling the benefits it brings, npower Business Solutions (nBS) marks the start of this transition for industrial and commercial customers.

MHHS is a new industry-wide change that supports innovative time-of-use tariffs, rewarding customers for using energy off-peak and helping create a more flexible energy system. By measuring customer’s electricity use every 30 minutes, it will provide detailed consumption data – allowing customers to make more informed decisions on their energy use, while supporting the grid in balancing supply and demand – helping build a greener, more efficient system and improve how suppliers buy and sell electricity.

Ben Whitelam, Director of Commercial and Data Metering Services at npower Business Solutions, explains: “This marks another milestone for us and for our electricity supply customers as we embark on a transition that will support the UK to embrace a smarter, more flexible energy system fit for a more sustainable, carbon-free future.

“MHHS is the biggest change to impact the energy sector since privatisation. It will see supply for all UK electricity consumers settled every half hour – that’s 48 calculations of who’s using what, when and where in every 24-hour period – which amounts to 17,520 data points for every customer each year.

“As you can perhaps imagine, our Data and Metering Services team has been very busy upgrading and expanding our systems to deal with this huge volume of data.

“And as one of the first UK suppliers to have qualified to transition consumers in the first wave – we’ll start to migrate our customer’s meters onto the new MHHS systems.”

But what does this mean for nBS customers? The main advantage will be the growth in flexibility services that MHHS will facilitate – and the money-saving opportunities that will follow.

For those nBS customers who already have half-hourly meters, there will be minor changes to metering services. For customers still with traditional meters, an increase in metering costs is likely as the data load and meter reading requirements increase. However, upgrading to a meter with automated meter reading – or AMR – technology could cost less – and allow customers to access future flexibility services.

Over the next six months, nBS plans to migrate around 95% of customer meters to the new MHHS system and will complete all 100% before the industry deadline of May 2027.

We’re one of the first business suppliers to qualify to start moving customers to the MHHS system, following the lead of our E.ON Next business where we’ve been helping set benchmarks for the industry by switching residential and SME customers to the new system since last October.

And as the energy landscape continues to evolve, we’re proud to be at the forefront, driving innovation and helping to set the pace for the industry. This is a significant step forward in our commitment to delivering smarter, more efficient energy solutions for our customers. 

MHHS will play a key role in helping us make new energy work. We’re not just keeping up with the future, we’re shaping it!