Market-wide half-hourly settlement (MHHS) — what businesses need to know
Ofgem's MHHS programme moves every UK meter onto half-hourly settlement. What that means for your bills, your contract structure and your ability to save.
What MHHS actually is
Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement (MHHS) is the Ofgem programme moving every electricity meter in Great Britain onto half-hourly settlement — the same settlement basis currently used for Profile Class 00 (HH) meters. Instead of suppliers being settled against a generic load profile based on your meter class, they'll be settled against your actual half-hourly consumption from your smart meter.
Timeline
The programme has run through phased delivery windows with the industry-wide switchover completing in the mid-2020s. Suppliers, the DCC (Data Communications Company) and the elective HH agent ecosystem have already been built out; the remaining work for most businesses is meter upgrade to SMETS2 smart metering.
What changes on your bill
For most SMEs the headline unit rate structure doesn't change on day one. What changes is what suppliers can offer over time: time-of-use tariffs that were previously only viable on HH-metered sites become viable for every business, and suppliers can price accurately against your actual load shape rather than a generic profile.
The upside — sharper tariffs for the well-shaped
Businesses with an efficient load shape (steady baseload, minimal evening peaks, weekend usage that matches renewables generation) will be able to access materially cheaper tariffs than the generic-profile price they get today. Retailers with tightly-controlled trading hours, offices with strong 09-17 shapes, and industrial sites already running efficient cycles are natural winners.
The downside — sharper tariffs for the poorly-shaped
The mirror-image: businesses with heavy evening peaks, high weekend demand, or spiky uncontrolled loads will be priced more accurately for the network cost they impose. In practice most suppliers will continue to offer simple fixed-price options aimed at exactly these customers, but the price competitiveness gap will widen.
What to do now
Two things. First, make sure your site has a working SMETS2 smart meter with data flowing every 30 minutes — if it doesn't, request an install from your supplier. Second, at your next renewal, ask any broker or supplier for a load-shape review: they can tell you whether your shape is a net asset or a net liability under MHHS-era pricing, and what — if anything — is worth changing.
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