Bringing more flexibility to the grid
Flexibility measures help balance the grid by enabling adjustments to electricity supply and demand.
These measures are broadly categorised into two types, often being referred to as either supply or demand side measures, depending on whether it's the supply or demand for power that is being adjusted.
Traditionally, the grid has mostly relied on supply-side measures working with flexible generators to ensure supply matches demand, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the demand-side has an important role to play.
While the supply side is primarily the domain of generators, the demand side belongs to consumers with demand side response (DSR) becoming more important than ever.
In the simplest terms, DSR is simply a change in power consumption habits by consumers.
Households, hospitals, factories, and others on the demand side can help balance the grid by turning demand up, down or shifting it so that it better matches the available energy supply. These actions can either be behavioural or can be automated through smart or intelligent connected devices or appliances.
For households, this could be as simple as charging electric vehicles when there’s plenty of cheap renewable energy or choosing not to do laundry when electricity is scarce. On its own, a single household won’t make a significant impact, but there’s strength in numbers.
With the launch of National Grid’s Flexibility trial in winter 2022, we’ve seen the first mass market live trials of behavioural demand side response for households in the UK, and they've shown a lot of promise.
British Gas customers via our PeakSave demand flexibility scheme alone managed to save enough energy to power 750,000 homes for one hour demonstrating the potential that DSR could play in balancing the grid.
Centrica has also been investing in adapting our market leading flexibility and Virtual Power Plant platform to work with devices in the home. Using the latest AI and optimisation technologies, we are able to connect communities of energy users in revolutionary new ways.
Through partnerships with device manufacturers and installers, we already have close to 12,000 (almost 50MW) home batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps and electric heating appliances across UK, Belgium and Netherlands providing fully automated balancing services to the network operators.
Under British Gas Zero, we're also integrating this intelligent energy platform with our Hive and British Gas energy platforms to launch next generation consumer propositions for EV, battery and electric heating customers in the UK.
We're also exploring and investing in many net zero aligned flexible electricity generation and storage opportunities to support from the supply side such as our battery storage facility in Roosecote and through our optimisation capabilities through our Energy Marketing and Trading business.
We already have an operational portfolio of low carbon, flexible generation assets in the UK and Ireland, and are progressing several new opportunities, with over £400m of in-train projects, including hydrogen and more battery storage.