Demand-side Response
In July 2020, National Grid published its 2020 Future Energy Scenarios (“FES-2020”), its annual update on the four scenarios describing what it sees as the “credible pathways for the future of energy over the next thirty years.” They are not intended to be firm [...]
Building on the recent development of local flexibility markets, a couple of domestic demand-side response ("DSR") trials are underway to explore whether households can provide flexibility to local electricity networks. The trials take different approaches: WPD's Sustain-H trial uses suppliers as intermediaries while in [...]
Almost out of the blue, last week, while all attention was on Brexit, came a decision from the General Court of the European Union that has led to the suspension of the GB Capacity Market. This means that all capacity payments are on hold, [...]
National Grid recently published a roadmap to widening access to the Balancing Mechanism to smaller, distributed assets and demand-side response. The increasing de-centralisation of the electricity system, along with the growth in intermittent generation, is making the task of balancing the system more challenging [...]
In recent weeks, much has been made of the fact that coal has dropped out of the merit order for days at a time. While much of the commentary is around trying to prove that the system can run just fine without dirty thermal [...]
The electricity system is in transition. Transmission connected, centralised synchronous generation is being displaced by multiple small installations of intermittent asynchronous generation connected at the distribution level. Advances in sub-transmission technology including as storage, smart homes, electric vehicles, DSR and others are challenging the [...]
The last couple of months have seen some interesting newsflow in relation to electricity storage. Storage projects are increasingly popular, with developments occurring at every level of the system from grid-connected utility-scale projects to behind-the-meter domestic storage, and the Government together with Ofgem is [...]
Last week Energyst published its latest report into the demand side response market, which confirmed the findings of previous reports, that businesses are generally positive about DSR as long as operations are not affected. Un-tapped appetite among SMEs was also identified. The survey found [...]
Following on from my previous post on energy efficiency, I was very interested to read about a recent study by the University of Bath which shows a significant gap between the forecast energy efficiency of new buildings and their actual performance once in use. “A [...]
This week I attended an event run by the Energy Institute on whether in the context of the UK’s industrial strategy the policy can keep up with the energy market. One comment that was made repeatedly was that UK businesses are bad at exploiting [...]