“We are developing a new service that will be available for consumers to benefit from across this winter and will be announcing further information soon,” a spokesman for National Grid ESO said.

Reports about the new scheme suggest that households could receive up to £6 per kilowatt hour (kWh) saved. That’s equivalent to just under one hour’s use of a dishwasher or a quarter of a tumble dryer cycle (according to Uswitch, one tumble dryer load uses 4.5 kWh of energy per cycle).

With energy bills rising at a terrifying rate, this scheme will no doubt be welcome news to many of us. After all, energy industry analysts are predicting that the average annual bill will reach £3,582 by the time the energy price cap goes up in October – £200 higher than was previously estimated, and £2,182 higher than the average bill last October.

Energy crisis: people could get paid to reduce their usage during peak hours under new plans