Every so often a client tells us they’ve already looked into government support for their electricity bill and didn’t find anything, only for it to turn out they were looking at the British Industry Supercharger and concluded — correctly, for their business — that they didn’t qualify. That’s a shame, because BICS is a different scheme with a different, wider net, and it’s easy to assume one ruled out the other.

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.