National Grid ESO’s knowledge of the technical and commercial preferences of existing and emerging service providers is limited. We need to develop effective markets in a rapidly changing electricity system. This project aims to address this knowledge gap and generate guidance on how to design future markets to better account for changing asset types. This is especially pertinent given Government targets to deploy and scale up new technologies that don’t participate in existing markets. The outcomes of this project will be used to improve our markets to increase liquidity and facilitate a better customer experience, ultimately reducing costs to consumers.
Benefits
Each of the Future Energy Scenarios (FES) forecasts identifies a range of new service providers that underpin the energy system transition. ESO markets can help facilitate their maturity on the network by designing markets to account for their technical and commercial requirements. By building confidence into the role of these emerging service providers, we can reduce our reliance on conventional assets. Employing the guidance created in this project will allow the ESO to be an ‘enabler’ of the energy system transition by reducing barriers to markets and unlocking new routes to market that will provide investment signals to help facilitate the energy system transition.
Learnings
Outcomes
As the research is ongoing, these are the interim outcomes of the project:
This NIA project has received considerable internal and external interest owing to the importance of understanding our customers. Internally, a slide pack detailing the technological capacities has proved to be an insightful resource for many teams as many projects covering a breadth of technologies are occurring in parallel to this NIA report. For example, an ongoing NIA project exploring the role of Hydrogen for Constraint Management was able to draw upon the insight provided by this project.
Externally the project team have liaised with The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) who have also shown an interest in the role of these technologies. At the time of writing, presentations have been delivered and resources provided from this project to help inform policymakers. All relevant information will continue to be shared as the project progresses.
Lessons Learnt
- Breadth of topic – longer timescales – lots of interest
The project received considerable interest from our customers and stakeholders which led to greater timescales required to see progress in various work packages. In hindsight, more time could have been applied to this.
- Detailing technological requirements
An in-depth literature review was conducted within Phase 1 to better understand the technical characteristics of existing and future service providers. The results of this exercise provide an in-depth understanding of these characteristics and we therefore recommend the use of this research method for future similar studies. This allowed progression onto the next stages to include more depth owing to understanding the technologies technical abilities.
- Technology sheets – useful visual
Building on from the technical requirements above, the data and context has been usefully summarized into a ‘technology sheet’ section which details the technical alongside commercial considerations / wider landscape notes for the technology in question. This has allowed the ESO to disseminate information pertaining to a certain technology across the ESO and to external stakeholders with ease and communicates the key messages well. This should be recommended as a viable means to convey information in a succinct manner for future projects.
