Triads, the top three half-hour peaks of national energy demand from November to February, are applied retrospectively by the National Grid. With businesses at risk of spending upwards of £34,000 per megawatt of electricity during a Triad – significantly higher than the average winter price of energy per megawatt – missing a warning could cost some businesses millions of pounds in additional energy spend, says npower.

Wayne Mitchell, head of industrial and commercial at npower, said: “Our alerts are forecast up to two weeks in advance and we issue warnings 24 hours before a Triad occurs to ensure that businesses can decide how best to manage their energy consumption. Whether businesses are a customer or not, they are able to sign up to the Triad warning service from npower.”

Businesses can estimate how much they could save by responding to Triad warnings using npower’s free Triad savings calculator tool at http://bit.ly/TriadCalculator.