Northern Powergrid has named 19 areas where it wants to pay customers to change their power generation or consumption patterns in a way that helps to manage peaks in generation and demand on the electricity network.
It aims to procure these ‘flexibility services’ from businesses that consume significant amounts of energy (such as factories or supermarkets), local electricity generators and electricity supply aggregators. It has invited them to express an interest in providing the services between 2023 and 2028.
Flexibility gets better value out of the existing network and helps avoid further investment. The customer providing the flexibility services could offer to shift the time of energy usage (for example in a factory), support the local network with generation or offering to charge empty energy storage with excess power.
Northern Powergrid says providing visibility of where it may purchase flexibility in the future gives customers an opportunity understand the new income stream.
Northern Powergrid would like to hear from all interested parties, large or small, whether already connected to the network or considering a new connection. This call is a stepping stone to Northern Powergrid procuring flexibility services at some or all of these 19 sites via competitive tenders in mid-2022 and again in subsequent years.
Liz Sidebotham, commercial manager for new markets at Northern Powergrid, commented: “We expect flexibility services to grow and become an increasingly important tool in how we manage the electricity network as the low- carbon transition accelerates with technologies such as electric cars, heat pumps, batteries and renewable generation changing the way our customers generate and use electricity.”
Any organisation that thinks it may be able to provide flexibility services to Northern Powergrid should contact [email protected] by Friday 18 March. The electricity distributor will then follow up to discuss the opportunities,
For a site to provide flexibility it must be located in the relevant position on the electricity distribution network – this includes connection voltage level and geographic location. A portfolio of providers could together deliver the full flexibility requirement, and so Northern Powergrid is interested in hearing from providers even if they are able to deliver only part of the required capacity for part of the time window. This information is displayed for the 19 sites in this update in the table below.