Major UK energy supplier handing households free electric on exact day each week
To earn the free electricity, you have to switch your electricity use away from weekday peak hours each week (4pm to 7pm)
A major energy supplier is giving households free electricity on Sundays. EDF Energy has brought back its Sunday Saver challenge this month.
To earn the free electricity, you have to switch your electricity use away from weekday peak hours each week (4pm to 7pm). In return, you will get between four and 16 hours of free electricity to use the following Sunday.
A 5% reduction in peak consumption would earn four hours of free electricity, a 20% reduction earns eight hours, 35% earns twelve hours, and using 50% less earns 16 hours of free electricity.
The current round of Sunday Saver is set to last until June 8. But in order to take part, you needed to have signed up through your EDF account by May 4.
It is worth keeping an eye on your emails, as EDF regularly announces new Sunday Saver challenges. You need a working smart meter that sends readings every 30 minutes to EDF.
More than 150,000 customers have benefitted from Sunday Saver since the challenge began last year, earning over six million free hours of electricity, with £1.6million being credited to customer bill accounts.
Rich Hughes, Director of Retail at EDF, said: 'EDF's Sunday Saver challenge has been a tremendous success so far - not only is it helping customers save money but customers are also taking steps to contribute to a more sustainable electricity grid.
'Thanks to smart meters, customers can access innovative schemes like Sunday Saver and easily track their energy usage in our Energy Hub platform, helping them identify areas they can save in their house and reduce their carbon footprint.'
It comes after energy analysts at Cornwall Insight today predicted the Ofgem price cap will fall by £129 on average from this summer. The Ofgem energy price cap is currently set at £1,849 a year for the typical household paying by direct debit.
The latest forecast from energy analysts at Cornwall Insight say this could fall by around 7% to £1,720 from July - however, this is still far more expensive than what energy bills used to be. The exact amount you pay for energy depends on how much gas and electricity you use.
The Ofgem price cap does not put a limit on how much you can pay for energy - instead, it sets a maximum unit price for unit rates of gas and electricity, plus standing charges.
The energy price cap covers around 22 million households in England, Wales and Scotland and is updated every three months. Cornwall Insight expects "a modest drop" in the price cap this October, followed by another in January 2026.
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BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
'Sizewell C will be colossal for job opportunities in Suffolk'
Students in Suffolk will benefit from a "colossal" jobs boom during and beyond the construction of Sizewell C, local educators C bosses say the project will support as many as 70,000 jobs across the UK once complete, with 10,000 workers required throughout the peak of the part of the development 1,500 apprenticeships have also been pledged, designed to equip the next generation with the skills needed for a career in nuclear Coast College student Skye Dorward credited Sizewell C with "increasing the number of opportunities and pathways" into the industry for young people. Engineering student Ms Dorward, 19, has secured a nuclear engineering degree apprenticeship with EDF, which she hopes will lead to a job at the plant."The work and educational prospects it offers to young people is so great," she said."The challenges and opportunities Sizewell C is presenting are outstanding, so coming back to Suffolk to work on Sizewell C would be really good."I would love the chance to work on that project."Sizewell C, which is expected to cost about £20bn to build, will be a two-reactor nuclear power station that could generate 3.2 gigawatts of electricity for 60 it's not just nuclear engineering roles that will need to be wider Sizewell C project will require workers from several industries - including construction, catering and digital marketing, IT and hospitality. Emma Taylor, director of business development and major projects at Suffolk New College, said Sizewell C posed a "colossal opportunity for great new jobs".The college and Sizewell have long worked together to develop curricula that will give students the best chance of capitalising on the jobs the plant could generate."We have been really integral to their conversations about what are the key roles that are going to be needed to enable this project," Ms Taylor told the BBC."A number of our students really see the opportunities [Sizewell C offers] and that is growing and we're absolutely passionate to enable [them to pursue] those opportunities."There is a growth in the number of young people applying for construction courses and we are no exception – we've had real growth in that area, which is fantastic." 'Quite remote' Leiston was once being a thriving manufacturing town but, in more recent years, many feel it has lacked the capacity to provide career to the ONS, 79.1% of people in East Suffolk, however, were already in paid work or had a job, with an average weekly wage of £ Pyke, managing director of Sizewell C, told the BBC she was "committed" to ensuring at least one third of the workforce was made of local people."There will be a lot of high quality jobs in an area which is quite remote and where there isn't currently enough high quality employment," she said. Phil Stittle, executive director of business and skills at West Suffolk College, said he was determined to ensure anyone could benefit from the jobs boom."As an educator, we need to ensure the next generation understands that [Sizewell C] is going to be a great option for people to go and work at," he told the BBC."But we also work with a lot of different agencies that support adult retraining, those that come from the military and prison and even care leavers."We are looking to make sure we are not leaving anybody behind by training everyone that we can to support that big need [for jobs]."I think the positives of Sizewell C far outweigh the negatives." On Tuesday, the government confirmed it would be investing a further £14.2bn in the scheme, having already previously pledged £ the construction's height, the project will command the expertise and labour of 10,000 people – about 4,000 more than actually live in nearby locals, this has long proved a concern, with some worried about whether or not the town will be able to cope with such an influx of also fear the workforce demand at Sizewell C will dry up the employment pool available for local Kirtley, from Together Against Sizewell C, said: "I think it will have a huge impact on local businesses."Whether it's building firms or in hospitality, people cannot match the Sizewell C money and the wages they are paying." But Sizewell C joint managing director, Ms Pyke, disagrees."We are offering people progression and by investing in education and training we hope the amount of people wanting to work in East Suffolk increases so that all needs can be met," she said."We are not going to be paying out of line wages to people for similar jobs or luring people from their current jobs." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Telegraph
13 hours ago
- Telegraph
Six years late and £28bn over budget, this project signals disaster for Ed Miliband's nuclear plans
'Build and repeat.' That is the plan for Sizewell C, the nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast which Ed Miliband has announced plans to pump billions of pounds into. Writing in The Telegraph, he hailed a new 'golden age' for the British nuclear industry, pledging £14.2 billion for two reactors at Sizewell which will, eventually, provide six million homes with electricity. Eventually being the operative word. News that the Government is throwing its weight behind nuclear in the midst of the Energy Secretary's pursuit of net zero was met with relief by some campaigners – and, indeed, by anyone who doesn't want to find themselves plunged into darkness if the grid is forced to grapple with unreliable renewables. But concerns have been raised about the modelling. Sizewell is to be a rinse and repeat of Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor power station in Somerset which has been beset with problems from the moment EDF first broke ground there in early 2017. The Government says it's to be almost an exact replica. Meanwhile on its website, Sizewell C points to 'the benefits of replication'. 'Sizewell C will use the same design as Hinkley Point C,' it adds. It says Hinkley has already 'created a huge workforce and supply chain' and that replication 'means Sizewell C will benefit from all the efficiencies and expertise learnt by our sister project'. Efficiency and expertise. It's one way of summing up Hinkley, though it does rather overlook the £28 billion it has gone over budget to date, the endless delays and challenges from environmentalists, not to mention the international political tensions. China's General Nuclear is a significant shareholder in the project, but in 2023 halted funding for it as relations between London and Beijing worsened; the same year the UK government took over the country's stake in Sizewell C. Meanwhile, work at the site crawls on, its deadline shifting and bill expanding. Still, EDF says Hinkley's second reactor is being built 25 per cent faster than the first unit, and suggests this should be taken as good news for Sizewell's envisaged two reactors, which are, effectively, planned to be the third and fourth in Britain's nuclear quartet. Meanwhile, experts agree it makes sense in principle to transfer the lessons learnt and systems already established at the Somerset site to Suffolk. Iolo James, head of communications at the Nuclear Industry Association, stresses the importance of 'building in fleet rather than building one at a time'. 'The more you build, the cheaper and quicker that is,' he says. That may be true, though there has been nothing cheap or quick about Britain's nuclear renaissance so far. Where we were once pioneers in the push for nuclear power (the world's first commercial-scale nuclear power station came online in Calder Hall, Cumbria, in 1956), decades of sparse investment have meant the UK has now fallen far behind other countries. At Sizewell, many question how possible it will be in practice to shift operations from one side of England to the other. Alison Downes, of the campaign group Stop Sizewell C, suspects the idea that you can simply move teams and processes without a hitch is unrealistic. 'The company want people involved in Hinkley Point C to come over and do what they've done there again at Sizewell C, but unless there's a seamless transition and the roles that they're just finishing at Hinkley start at Sizewell, then the likelihood is those people will go off and find other jobs and then are lost to the supply chain,' she says. 'Hinkley has been delayed, yes, but Sizewell has also been delayed. It's very difficult to get two projects of this size to perfectly dovetail.' Even if they do manage to bring some of that infrastructure across, it's hard to make the case that Hinkley has been a poster project for Britain's nuclear prowess. Last February, EDF said it had taken a near £11 billion hit amid delays and overrunning costs on the project. The month before, it said the plant was expected to be completed by 2031 and cost up to £35 billion. Factoring in inflation, the real figure could be more like £46 billion. It was, let's not forget, initially supposed to have started generating electricity in 2017 and cost £18 billion. When construction finally began the same year, it was expected that the plant would be completed by 2025. It will now come online six years later than that and at more than double the cost of the initial estimate. So not, it would be fair to say, an unmitigated success as major infrastructure projects go. Then again, some would argue successful infrastructure is an oxymoron in Britain today. The latest estimated spend for HS2 is £102 billion – almost double the projected cost. Crossrail cost £4 billion more than expected and weathered significant delays. And across the country, countless projects – bridges, tramlines and motorways – remain unfinished or unbuilt altogether. 'The public expectations on this sort of stuff is so low nowadays,' says Ed Shackle, a researcher at Public First. 'With all of these big promises – and that goes for things like HS2 as well – they are not expecting the Government to do anything. They're very sceptical that the Government could deliver anything big.' The plan to launch us into a nuclear-powered future might sound promising, but can Labour get it done? While the public is supportive of the idea of projects like Sizewell in principle (Public First's polling shows there is a 41 per cent net support for the building of new nuclear power stations) and wants the Government to make big swings, time and again they have seen these things fail or fall by the wayside. 'They think the country is in a very bad way and we need major overhaul, but major projects have been poorly managed and delivered, and in their local areas, people see decline everywhere,' says Shackle. 'They want to see actual delivery behind these big promises.' Downes points out the last update on Hinkley came in January last year, 'when there were still five or six years to go, so there was plenty of time for things to get even worse'. That same month, EDF said further delays were in the offing because of a row about fish. The energy company was struggling to agree protection measures for fish in the River Severn. Fears thousands could be killed in water cooling intakes had 'the potential to delay the operation of the power station'. This was after months of tussling with environmentalists over the plant's seawater cooling system. At the time, Sir Keir Starmer, then in opposition, said delays to Hinkley were evidence of a system that was 'holding us back and stifling growth', citing 'countless examples of Nimbys and zealots gumming up the legal system often for their own ideological blind spots to stop the Government building the infrastructure the country needs'. Now, dovetailing the construction of Sizewell with Hinkley is one of the main things bolstering confidence in the Suffolk project. Stuart Crooks, managing director of Hinkley Point C, said the 'innovation and experience' developed at Hinkley 'will benefit our twin project at Sizewell C from the start'. 'We have trained a new workforce and built the nuclear supply chain,' Crooks says. 'Now those skilled workers and businesses can give Britain the energy security and economic growth it needs at Sizewell C, together with small modular reactors and future large nuclear plants.' Supporters also argue things will be different the second time around. The first nuclear build since the 1990s, Hinkley, they say, was always destined to take longer and cost more than initially predicted. 'It's been well documented that Hinkley has had issues in terms of going over budget, and the timescale,' says James. 'That's predominantly due to the fact that we haven't built a nuclear power station in a generation... We've had to relearn how to build them. 'The way Sizewell will benefit from that is all the learnings from Hinkley will be there for Sizewell and its team when it starts construction in earnest... If you view Sizewell C as unit three and four [after Hinkley's one and two], then you'll see the efficiencies become even greater for that project.' Julia Pyke, joint managing director of Sizewell C, tells The Telegraph the site would be an 'exact copy, above ground, of Hinkley Point C'. 'When the design for Hinkley was brought into the UK, they had to make 7,000 design changes – because we're a copy, the equivalent for us is just 60,' she says. 'What that means in practical terms is that we know, in a way that Hinkley didn't know, how much concrete we need to pour, how much steel we need, how much cable we need to buy; we know how many hours it took to undertake a task for the first unit at Hinkley and the savings they were able to make for the second unit, and we can learn from that. We have a greater cost certainty because of that fixed design.' It sounds promising, but campaigners are less optimistic, pointing out the significant geographical differences between the sites. 'I get the principals behind replication – but the thing you can't do is replicate the site,' says Downes, who understands Sizewell is set to be a more expensive site to develop than Hinkley. 'There are very specific complexities around the Sizewell C site... It's quite likely that any savings they might expect to make through replication will be absorbed in the more complex groundworks.' While Hinkley is 'a dry site', Sizewell C is by the sea. 'It's going to need huge sea defences. They've got to build a crossing over a Site of Special Scientific Interest. They've got to build a deep cut-off wall. There's a lot of associated development that's needed because there's less infrastructure than there is down at Hinkley Point C. These are the sorts of things that concern us.' The Energy Secretary, for his part, is still adamant this is to be the start of a 'golden age'. 'We will not accept the status quo of failing to invest in the future and energy insecurity for our country,' he said. 'We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean energy abundance, because that is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis.'
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Telegraph
Miliband has got his nuclear plans wrong. Here's what we should do
Yesterday, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband announced a new 'golden age ' of nuclear energy. But with the wrong technology, unfit regulation and no real delivery plan, his golden age already looks tarnished. He's pinning his hopes on an already out-dated large-scale nuclear technology that has been plagued by construction problems in Finland, France and the UK and whose developer EDF is already moving on to a newer version. And while his commitment to small modular reactors (SMRs) is commendable, they are at best a decade away with no examples in existence in the West. While it is tempting to think you could simply hoist a submarine reactor onto a dock and call it a power station, this is unrealistic. Military reactors are designed for stealth, speed and war, not for civilian safety, grid connectivity or cost-efficiency. So Rolls Royce has had to develop an entirely new concept. In fact the current market leaders in Western SMR-design are GE-Hitachi whose small boiling water reactors recently began construction in Canada. However, given the imminent retirement of all but one of our existing large nuclear reactors, bigger is better for the nuclear ambition, and in this, Miliband's plan is woefully inadequate. Luckily, there is a solution ready and waiting: the Korean APR1400 design which has been successfully completed in both South Korea and UAE with eight units now in operation, built in an average of 8.5 years, at an average cost of $5-6 billion. Far cheaper than the £40 billion some analysts expect Sizewell C to cost. Around £6 billion is thought to have been spent already. The Korean design has been approved by both US and European regulators and should be a no-brainer for the UK: build what works. But to do this we need to take an axe to our overgrown thicket of nuclear regulation. The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) bizarrely reports to the Department for Work and Pensions, not the Energy Secretary, and sits beyond any meaningful strategic oversight. This well-intentioned separation has resulted in a regulatory regime akin to requiring 57 seat belts in your car – technically thorough, but practically unhinged. One requirement is that each new reactor design must expose workers to even less radiation than its predecessor. That might sound like progress, until you realise that radiation levels inside a modern nuclear plant are already so low they're hard to detect at all. The plant manager at one of our old Advanced Gas Cooled reactors (AGRs) once told me that the only time his radiation detector registered anything other than zero was when he left it on his desk and the sun shone on it. Nuclear workers are typically exposed to more radiation on the street than inside the plant. At this point, further exposure reductions offer no safety benefit. They just add cost, complexity and delay. The environmental regulators are as bad. The Sizewell C design is exactly the same as Hinkley Point C and the site is almost identical to Sizewell A and B. So why on earth were 40,000 pages of environmental statements required? This regulatory excess is expensive and draws out the process of approving new reactors beyond what is remotely reasonable. Britain risks running out of electricity. We had a near miss blackout event in January that was likely a factor in the renewal of the controversial biomass subsidies. We are also likely to see further small extensions to our ageing AGRs which are nearing the ends of their lives. But with a third of our fleet of gas power stations dating back to the 1990s and expected to retire in the next five years, Britain can ill afford delays to new nuclear plants. Particularly not the sort of avoidable delays our overzealous regulators have created. If Miliband is serious both about his golden age of nuclear, and more particularly, keeping the lights on in a decarbonised world, he needs to be far more ambitious. A truly serious plan would involve a programme of 5-6 large-scale reactors, and since the Koreans have the best track record, we should sign them up. He needs to get tough on the regulators. Abolishing ONR altogether and creating a new regulator, as part of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, with staff who are experts in risk management as well as nuclear safety, and severely curtailing the power of environmental regulators. One of the biggest benefits of nuclear power is its high energy density: it uses very little land to create a lot of energy. That should be taken into account, with regulators forced to look at the national picture rather than taking a strictly site by site approach. And he needs to stop wasting time with incentives for investors. They are not interested in the risk of our shambolic regulatory landscape. He should face this reality, and commit public money for the construction of the first two new reactors, re-financing once construction is completed. This would be a profitable strategy: the Government can borrow more cheaply than the private sector, the Korean design (with suitable regulatory restraint) can be built faster than the Hinkley design, meaning lower financing costs, and nuclear reactors are very profitable to run so investors will be very interested once the risky construction phase is over. He could even offer shares to the public in a 21st Century version of 'Just tell Sid' which remains the most successful public share subscription in UK history, and would perfectly align with Chancellor Rachel Reeves' ambition for UK savers to deploy their capital in the interests of national infrastructure.
