CrowdFlex aims to establish residential flexibility as a reliable energy and grid management resource, establishing it alongside business as usual solutions such as network reinforcement or new thermal capacity, using system operational principles to develop a new digital service. CrowdFlex builds on a significant first phase, https://smarter.energynetworks.org/projects/nia2_ngeso001/, which sized the market opportunity and the viability of consumer response.
Problem Bring Solved
- Predicting the current and future needs for domestic energy provision for heat, power, and transport, and how flexibility can reprofile these to support the power system. Building on CrowdFlex:NIA (which focused on residential loads and EV demand), this Project will also explore residential heat. CrowdFlex:Trial will assess how the impact of EV charging, heat pumps, and other emerging low carbon technologies on customers electricity bills can be reduced when consumers participate in domestic flexibility.
- Coordinating energy transmission, distribution, and system operation. CrowdFlex partners represent stakeholders across the power system. CrowdFlex aims to develop commercial frameworks to allow the ESO and DNOs to coordinate their needs and transmit them to consumers via effective tariffs.
- Planning future policy, regulatory conditions, and market designs to support whole system approaches. CrowdFlex will identify the market design of flexibility services that coordinate the needs of the ESO and DNOs, while lowering consumers' energy bills. CrowdFlex will align demand to variable renewable energy generation, reducing stress on the transmission and distribution networks.
- Maximising efficiency in large-scale network and system investments by taking a whole systems view across generation and demand side changes linked to decarbonisation. Domestic flexibility will improve the efficiency of existing investments, deferring or avoiding investment in new network and generation capacity. These savings can be transmitted to consumers, reducing energy bills.
Impacts and benefits
Discovery has confirmed strong appetite from ESO/DNOs for domestic flexibility to play an active role in energy markets and services. The introduction of such a large resource of flexibility could greatly reduce the operational costs of the ESO (namely constraints, reserve and energy balancing, which amounted to £2B in 2021 (£72 per household) and strategic capacity and network investments.
CrowdFlex distinguished market appetite for both “Routine” type actions to make energy markets more efficient (supported by ToU tariffs) and “Response” actions to support system operation and network and system planning. It identified the value of a reliable consumption baseline to reduce reserve and balancing costs.
We identified that shifting demand out of peak times via ToU tariffs is already factored into the deliverability of Net-Zero policies, and CrowdFlex will be critical vehicle for delivery. The need to mitigate VRE constraints/redispatch costs will be essential to the affordability of net-zero policy.
Discovery confirmed:
- The current energy markets and services that CrowdFlex should target.
- Trial parameters required to test and mature services under Routine and Reserve categories.
- A behavioural based segmentation to improve the uptake of domestic flexibility.
- A novel methodology for forecasting domestic demand and flexibility
- A pathway to introducing exploitation of stochastic flexibility services.
- A commercial framework for domestic flexibility to address system challenges
- A high-level specification for future work in Alpha and in a future trial.
The only notable scope variation is that Alpha will include a Heat Roadmap to align with other projects exploring heat flexibility.
CrowdFlex has shown the capability to reprofile daily demand, supporting VRES uptake and lowering emissions from domestic demand. Additionally, Discovery has identified the opportunity to manage network constraints and reduce balancing costs. Benefits can flow to all electricity users.
Based on Element analysis of the value of domestic flexibility, households could generate up to £137 per year in savings. Assuming CrowdFlex becomes BAU, flexibility could be worth £1.25B p.a. across GB. This far outweighs the estimated £10-15M trial to establish a domestic flexibility resource. This includes £3.8B of avoided DN reinforcement and £1.8B of avoided transmission network reinforcement investments. This equates to 4.6MtCO2eq/year of avoided CO2 emissions, assuming peak demand is met with additional OCGTs. If initially 100,000 customers begin participating in domestic flexibility in 2024, growing out to 2050, The potential IRR of CrowdFlex is 318%.
