Demand Turn-Up Trial: What It Means for Solar Owners

The government's Demand Turn-Up trial will test whether homes and businesses can be given discounted electricity for using more power when wind and solar output is surplus to need. It is a funded pilot, not a tariff you can sign up to today, but it is aimed squarely at the kit solar owners already have: batteries, EV chargers and smart heating. Here is what has been published, what has not, and what to do now.

What the Demand Turn-Up trial is

A rebate pilot run through UKRI. The trial is jointly funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). Its stated aim is to assess whether “demand turn-up” can reduce renewable curtailment in Great Britain — the practice of paying wind farms to switch off when the grid cannot carry or use their output.

The money. The Innovate UK competition page for flexibility providers lists up to £16 million of grant funding shared between successful applicants. A 28 October 2026 announcement from delivery partner Ipsos describes the wider trial as worth £20m, with UKRI appointing Arup as delivery lead. The two figures come from different documents, so treat the exact total as unconfirmed until DESNZ or UKRI publishes a single figure.

How the discount would work. The Ipsos announcement says the offers are funded by rebates on Final Consumption Levies — the policy costs that sit on electricity bills. In plain terms, the trial tests whether trimming those levies during surplus periods makes it worthwhile for people to shift or increase demand then. The announcement says the programme runs until 2028 and is split into phases, the first focused on building a workable delivery model.

Who can take part — and who can’t, yet

Not directly. Applicants to the competition had to be UK-registered businesses acting as a Flexibility Service Provider (an energy supplier, aggregator or similar), and only single applicants were accepted. Households do not apply to UKRI. If the trial reaches you, it will be through a provider recruiting customers, and it is a limited test rather than an offer open to every home.

The expression-of-interest round is closed. It opened on 20 August 2026 and closed on 17 September 2026 after a short extension for technical problems. Aggregator listings of the competition put Phase 1 projects at 1 December 2026 to 31 March 2027, but we have not seen that confirmed on a government page. Which providers won, which regions are covered and which devices count have not been published in the sources we checked.

Where benefits are expected. Curtailment is concentrated where the grid is constrained, so any early offers are likely to cluster in constrained areas such as Scotland rather than being spread evenly across the country. That is an expectation, not a published list of postcodes.

Why it matters for solar and battery owners

If you already have a solar-plus-battery system, you have the hardware these trials look for: storage that can charge on demand and a smart controller that can follow a signal. The extra step is a smart meter and a tariff or provider that can pass on the signal. Octopus already runs comparable “Power-ups” and turn-up sessions for its customers, which we cover in our guide to Octopus tariffs for solar owners; the trial is a government-funded test of whether the same idea can scale.

It also fits a wider shift to time-of-use tariffs. Ofgem is separately consulting on how the time-of-use price cap should work once half-hourly settlement is in place, and surplus-power periods are exactly when negative or very low wholesale prices appear.

What to do now

Get the basics in place. Make sure you have a working smart meter, an app-controllable battery and, if you have one, an EV charger that can schedule charging. These are the prerequisites for almost any flexibility offer.

Don’t buy hardware for the trial. Nothing published says which devices qualify, and a pilot ending in 2028 is no basis for a purchase. Buy a battery on its savings from your own solar and a cheap overnight rate, not on a rebate that may never be offered to you.

Watch your supplier. If you are on a flexible tariff, expect any trial offer to arrive as an email or app invitation from a supplier or aggregator. Treat messages that ask for payment details to “join the government trial” with caution — there is no public sign-up route.

What we still don’t know

The published material does not yet say how large the rebate per kWh will be, whether home batteries and EV chargers are explicitly eligible, how many households will be recruited, or when offers go live beyond the Phase 1 window above. We will update this page when the providers are named.