What is a negawatt?
A negawatt is a watt you didn't use. Energy you saved, shifted, or simply didn't need — instead of energy a power station had to generate.
Where the word came from
The term was coined by the American physicist Amory Lovins in 1989, after a typo in a Colorado utility report wrote "negawatt" instead of "megawatt". Lovins kept the word because it captured something the energy industry had been quietly ignoring: the cheapest, cleanest unit of electricity is the one you never have to produce.
Saving a megawatt — through efficiency, timing, or avoidance — has the same effect on the grid as building a power station that generates one. And it's faster, cheaper, and cleaner.
Why it matters now
The UK grid has more wind and solar than ever. When supply is high and demand is low — windy nights, sunny weekend afternoons — wholesale prices fall, sometimes below zero. Octopus's Agile tariff passes those half-hourly prices through to consumers.
Shifting a load from a peak hour to a plunge hour doesn't just save you money. It's a real negawatt: less demand when the grid is strained, more demand when there's surplus clean energy looking for somewhere to go.
Why we picked the name
We wanted a name that wasn't about apps or dashboards or "smart" anything. The product is small on purpose: a chart, a sentence, and an optional email. The hard work is the noticing — and the noticing is the negawatt.
About the tariff
negawatt reads from Octopus Agile, a half-hourly variable-rate tariff. You'll need to be an Octopus customer to act on the prices.