The power of flexibility
In meeting our decarbonisation targets for 2030 and beyond, a lot of the focus has been on installing new renewable generation and new battery energy storage.
Don’t get me wrong, installing these new inverter-based energy resources is vital, but what about using the resources we already have? That’s where demand flexibility or ‘load flex’ comes in. Load flex is all about shifting your energy use to a time when the supply costs and emissions for that energy are lower.
The cost of energy and the emissions associated with that energy changes throughout the day. Load flex looks at ramping up the usage of your existing assets when prices are low and reducing the usage when they are high. In other words, optimising the use of your existing resources to save money and achieve our emissions reduction goals.
In practice, this may look like increasing energy usage in the middle of the day to capture maximum onsite solar, and benefit from low wholesale energy prices and network costs, and reducing usage during peak network periods and when energy commodity prices are high.
The potential for consumer load flexibility is so substantial that National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios state that by 2050 in the Holistic Transition Pathway that “the aggregation of consumer flexibility has 70 GW potential, which can reduce peak demand and turn up demand at times of oversupply.” To put that into perspective, GB’s current peak demand is 58GW and is forecasted to be 109GW by 2050 in this same Holistic Transition Pathway.
Lots of our loads are flexible, at least to some extent, including EV charging, heating and cooling, and industrial loads like data processing, mineral processing, green fuel production, or pumping, for example in waste water treatment plants. If you’re wondering why that last example was oddly specific, check out the video below, where I model this exact example in Gridcog.
Have you thought about how load flexibility could be incorporated into your energy projects? At Gridcog, we’ve long held the view that the most valuable projects integrate generation, load, and storage. Maybe it's time for you to embrace the power of flexibility?
Industry Insights
In GB, Ofgem has asked Elexon to become the Market Facilitator to align and further develop local flexibility markets in GB. This is to ensure that flexibility markets are more aligned on a GB level and to remove obstacles for customers looking to access them, such as streamlining the asset registration process. Ofgem expect this to be fully operational by early 2026. We look forward to seeing more assets participate in local flexibility markets as they continue to mature.
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In Australia, the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council has just released a National Roadmap for Consumer DER (CER), highlighting the value of CER flexibility to drive the Australian energy transition. The roadmap has a lot of focus on technical standards for secure communication and interoperability between CER and the energy system.
Even before the current ‘DER revolution’, Australia had large amounts of “controlled load” hot water systems (i.e. on separate metering elements with special tariffs and centralised control), which are now all shifting from overnight loads to middle-of-the-day loads to soak up the vast amount of roof-top solar that has been deployed; sometimes this is network-led and sometimes retailer-led, within large-scale residential virtual power plants.
Product Corner: Flexible Loads
A ‘Flexible Load’ is one of the Asset Types Gridcog supports. To add a Flexible Load Resource to your site model you begin by creating a ‘load schedule’ in the Library, where you define the energy requirements and flexible capacity of the load. You can then add this resource to your site, potentially linked to a specific sub-metered load.
Gridcog can then co-optimise the deployment of this load flexibility with any other co-located resources (e.g. roof-top solar and battery storage) taking into account network connection limits, supply costs, and the potential to earn revenue by participating in demand response programs or providing market services such as frequency control.
That’s all for this week. If you’d like to see how Gridcog can model your energy projects, click here to book a call with our team.
?Or, if you have any interesting project use-cases you’d like to see modelled in Gridcog, email our marketing magician [email protected] and we’ll spin it up!