Home charging company Ohme has rewarded EV drivers with £750,000 during an energy flexibility trial, but is also calling for a more joined-up approach from the UK Government on the issue.
Ohme has rewarded the cash during the course of the Crowdflex energy trials, the final results of which have just been published.
Crowdflex was the UK’s largest home energy flexibility trial running from May 2024 until September 2025 and was a study into how households can help increase flexibility in the electricity grid by shifting when energy is used.
Led by National Electricity System Operator (NESO) for Great Britain, the Crowdflex trials encouraged participating drivers to plug in their EVs whenever they were parked at home to earn rewards. Plugging-in more frequently and for longer gave Ohme more time to intelligently manage customer charging.
This optimisation enables better provision for important grid services, like helping the electricity system to meet peak demand, or making the most of renewable energy when it is available. In turn, it unlocks greater value for all customers by reducing costs and also lowering carbon emissions, the firm said.
During the trials, Ohme saw plug-in rates rise by 40% compared with a control group – showing that effective engagement can change driver habits.
Over 13 months of trials within the time period of Crowdflex, Ohme participated in more than 400 flexibility events, where Ohme’s chargers were either turned up or turned down, depending on what the electricity grid required. At its peak, Ohme
scaled up to 20,000 customers per trial – the biggest number of participants involved by any UK home EV charging company in a flexibility trial – flexing almost 150MW of electricity.
Crowdflex was awarded funding through Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund, which is managed in partnership with Innovate UK. The project is being delivered by a consortium of partners: Ohme, OVO, Centre for Net Zero, ERM, AWS, National Grid Electricity Distribution and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks.
Ohme is the official charger provider for Mercedes-Benz, Suzuki, Volvo Cars and the Volkswagen Group in the UK and Ireland as well as Genesis, Hyundai, Smart and XPeng in the UK, it is also the official exclusive charger provider for customers on the Motability scheme, the largest fleet operator in the UK.
David Watson, Ohme CEO, said:
“The Crowdflex energy trials have shown that companies like Ohme can play a crucial role in domestic flexibility by engaging customers and helping to save consumers more than £470 million per year in energy costs by 2036.
“We’ve demonstrated that our customers will shift their plug-in behaviour when needed, delivering significant flexible capacity through dynamic automated charging.
“But to move this knowledge on from trial to reality, we need more coordination across the Government and energy industry to give greater value and more rewards to our customers for the full system value that their home EV chargers can offer.”
Marzia Zafar, Deputy Director of Governance for Data and Digitalisation, Ofgem, said:
“Crowdflex is more than a trial, it’s a blueprint for the future of domestic flexibility. By developing real life data driven models that demonstrate how households can reliably support the grid, were laying the foundation for a smarter, more decentralised energy system.
“This work is critical to delivering the ambitions of Clean Power by 2030 and ensuring that consumers are at the heart of the energy transition.”
