Thirty percent sounds like a marketing number. It isn't. For high-consuming customers on dynamic tariffs who actively manage when they use electricity, savings in that range are documented, reproducible, and — critically — achieved without reducing overall consumption or comfort. The key is shifting when you consume, not how much.

The Concept of Load Shifting

Load shifting means moving flexible electricity consumption from expensive price periods to cheaper ones. The total consumption stays the same. The cost changes dramatically.

Think about the assets in your home or business that can operate at different times: a dishwasher, a washing machine, an EV charger, a heat pump, industrial refrigeration, an HVAC system, a battery storage unit. None of these need to run at peak hours on a Monday evening. They just default to it because no one has ever told them — or programmed them — to do otherwise.

On a dynamic tariff, you have a direct financial incentive to change that default. And increasingly, the technology to automate the change without any ongoing manual effort.

What the Price Differences Actually Look Like

On the Belgian day-ahead market, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive hours of a typical weekday can easily be €100-200/MWh — often more in winter. In practical terms, if you have an industrial process consuming 50kWh in a given period, running it during cheap hours rather than expensive ones could represent a difference of €5-10 for that single consumption event.

Do that systematically across your major flexible loads, across a full year, and the savings compound substantially. For a business consuming 100,000 kWh annually with meaningful flexibility, the numbers in the right market conditions can run into thousands of euros.

Automation Is the Real Enabler

The practical barrier to manual load shifting is obvious: you cannot watch electricity prices all day. But you do not need to. Energy management systems — ranging from simple smart plugs and time-of-use schedulers to sophisticated building energy management platforms — can read the day-ahead price curve published each afternoon and automatically schedule your flexible loads accordingly.

Your EV charger starts at 1am when wind prices are low. Your heat pump pre-heats the building before the morning peak. Your dishwasher runs at 3am rather than 10pm. You notice none of this directly. You notice it on your bill.

The Role of Your Own Generation

If you have solar panels, the interaction with dynamic pricing becomes even more interesting. When spot prices are high, you want to maximise self-consumption and export as little as possible (unless you have a good export tariff). When spot prices are very low, it may be optimal to import from the grid rather than drawing down battery storage — preserving your battery for a later expensive period.

This kind of arbitrage is not complex in principle, but it requires a tariff structure that reflects real-time prices. A fixed tariff makes smart energy management largely pointless. A dynamic tariff makes it genuinely rewarding.