National Grid ESO is inviting companies with small-scale power assets to join a trial where they participate directly in the Balancing Mechanism (BM).
The system operator plans to reduce the cost of balancing supply and demand in future by taking advantage of flexible operation of thousands of energy assets as small as EV chargers or domestic generation. Using this option will be cheaper and less carbon intensive than using large power stations and will allow flexible consumers to gain financial benefit. Currently the system operator uses relatively large assets in this way but feedback from the from market participants is that the current framework is a barrier to entry, leading to additional flexibility from smaller-scale assets being unavailable.
One issue to be addressed is metering requirements, which are too restrictive and costly for small assets. The system operator’s Power Responsive is addressing this barrier and while it does so the system operator wants to run a live trial with lower operational metering standards for assets smaller than < 100 kW.
Power Responsive is inviting industry to submit trial proposals. Initially it wants potential providers to email [email protected] to discuss registration and to register assets.