TL;DR:
- The Ofgem price cap rose 13% on July 1 — home battery owners have a direct financial incentive to optimise when they charge and discharge
- Grid flexibility trials, including a Duracell/EDF scheme running through summer 2026, pay battery owners to export electricity during peak demand periods
- Virtual power plants (VPPs) are becoming a real income stream for home storage owners — but the amounts vary and the right scheme depends on your battery, tariff, and usage
The Ofgem energy price cap increase on July 1 landed as expected — a 13% rise that pushed the average annual bill back above £1,700. For households that invested in solar and battery storage over the past few years, the timing is uncomfortable: the savings case that justified the investment keeps shifting as energy prices move.
What’s changed is that there’s now a more active market for what your battery can do when you’re not using it. Grid flexibility — the ability for energy suppliers and network operators to call on distributed storage to balance supply and demand — has been developing for several years, but it’s getting more accessible and more financially meaningful in 2026.
How Grid Flexibility Works
The electricity grid needs to balance supply and demand in real time. Historically, that meant spinning up gas peakers or pumped hydro when demand spiked. With more renewables on the system and more intermittent generation, the grid increasingly relies on demand-side flexibility: assets that can either reduce their consumption or export electricity when the grid is stressed.
Your home battery is exactly such an asset. It can:
- Charge at night when renewable generation is high and wholesale prices are low
- Export to the grid during peak demand periods when the grid needs support
- Shift your home’s demand by powering your home from stored energy rather than the grid during peak hours
Flexibility schemes pay you for doing this in a coordinated way. Instead of charging and discharging based purely on your own schedule, you agree to respond to signals from your supplier or aggregator.
Duracell and EDF’s Summer Flexibility Trial
A notable programme running through June to August 2026 is the Duracell/EDF joint flexibility trial. EDF is working with Duracell Energy battery systems to trial coordinated dispatch — where EDF can instruct Duracell batteries to export or hold charge based on real-time grid conditions.
Participants receive payments for each flexibility event: a period (typically 30 minutes to an hour) during which their battery exports to the grid on request. The payment rates in this trial are structured around how much you export and when, with higher rates during high-demand periods.
If you have a Duracell Energy battery and are an EDF customer, it’s worth checking whether you’re enrolled or eligible. Trials like this often expand their participant pools as they gather data.
The Demand Flexibility Service
The Demand Flexibility Service (DFS), run by National Grid ESO, has been the most publicly visible grid flexibility scheme since its launch in winter 2022/23. It pays households and businesses to reduce their consumption during specific peak periods — typically evening hours in winter when demand is highest.
In its earlier iterations, DFS was mostly accessible through smart energy tariffs like Octopus Intelligent or OVO’s Energy+. Participation was straightforward: receive a notification that a flexibility event is happening, shift consumption (or let your battery discharge to cover your home’s demand from storage rather than the grid), and receive a credit on your bill.
The payment rates for DFS events have varied, but participating households with smart devices or batteries have typically earned between £1.50 and £4 per event, depending on how much consumption they shifted. That doesn’t sound dramatic — but households that participate in every available event over a winter season can accumulate meaningful bill credits.
Virtual Power Plants: The Bigger Picture
Beyond individual trials, the broader concept at play here is the virtual power plant (VPP). A VPP aggregates the storage capacity of many home batteries into a combined flexible resource that can be dispatched as though it were a single large asset on the grid.
Octopus Energy’s Powerloop and similar aggregation schemes are the clearest UK example. Households with compatible batteries can enrol their system to be dispatched by Octopus when the grid needs it, in exchange for per-kWh payments when their battery discharges on behalf of the VPP.
The earnings from VPP participation depend on:
- Your battery’s capacity and discharge rate — larger, faster batteries can contribute more during each event
- How often events occur — this varies by season and grid conditions
- Your tariff — time-of-use tariffs like Agile or Intelligent align well with VPP participation because you’re already optimising for price signals
Realistic annual earnings for a 10kWh home battery participating in flexibility schemes range from around £100 to £400, depending on all of the above. That’s not a dramatic income, but in the context of a rising price cap, it meaningfully improves the economics of a battery installation that might otherwise be justified only by self-consumption of solar generation.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme Change
Unrelated to flexibility but relevant for anyone with a battery as part of a broader clean energy system: the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) is changing from 21 July 2026. The grant for air source heat pumps rises to £9,000 for off-gas-grid properties — a meaningful uplift for rural households where oil heating has been the only alternative to mains gas.
If you’re planning to pair a battery with a heat pump to maximise self-consumption of solar and minimise grid dependence, the new BUS grant makes the heat pump side of that investment significantly more accessible.
What to Do Now
If you have a home battery installed, the immediate steps are:
- Check which flexibility schemes your battery is compatible with. Not all battery systems integrate with all aggregators — check your battery manufacturer’s app or portal for enrolled or available programmes.
- Review your energy tariff. A time-of-use tariff that rewards off-peak charging (Octopus Agile, Intelligent, or similar) maximises the value of both self-consumption and flexibility participation.
- Register for DFS notification. If you’re on a smart tariff that participates in DFS events, make sure you’ve opted in. Some suppliers require active enrolment.
The grid flexibility market is developing quickly, and the financial case for participation is improving as events become more frequent and payment rates become more competitive. With the price cap headed in one direction, the case for getting your battery working harder is straightforward.