BICS and the British Industry Supercharger: not the same scheme, and you can’t have both

The Supercharger has been around for a while and offers a genuinely substantial benefit: full exemption from four separate levies — the Contracts for Difference scheme, the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs, and the Capacity Market — worth somewhere in the region of £65 to £87 per megawatt-hour for the businesses that qualify. That’s a bigger number than BICS offers. The catch is that it’s reserved for the most electricity-intensive industries under a stricter set of criteria, which is exactly why it leaves a lot of manufacturers out.

BICS was built to catch that gap. It exempts eligible businesses from three of those four levies — leaving out Contracts for Difference — worth an estimated £35 to £40 per megawatt-hour, and it applies a noticeably lower electricity-intensity bar to get in the door: 0.9% for frontier sectors, 2.7% for foundational ones, compared with the tougher threshold the Supercharger applies. The result is a much larger pool of eligible businesses — the government’s own figures now put it at over ten thousand manufacturers, roughly a third more than the original estimate once the final sector list was confirmed.

There’s one rule worth being very clear about: you cannot claim both. If your business already qualifies for the Supercharger, you’re excluded from BICS by design — the two schemes are meant to be complementary tiers, not stackable. For most of the manufacturers we talk to, that’s not actually a dilemma, because they were never going to clear the Supercharger’s stricter bar in the first place. But it’s worth checking your current arrangements before you spend time on a BICS application, particularly if your business or a group company has any existing energy-intensive-industry exemption already in place. Getting that sequencing wrong wastes the one submission you get — remember, BICS applications can’t be amended once they’re in.