As with other DR projects the scope can be limited by the necessity to gain the support and engage with customer’s willingness to participate. WPD will however identify suitable areas in the South West franchise area, where there are current issues arising from high penetration levels of solar generation coupled with insufficient load at times of high yield.The trial will be limited to half hourly metered supplies. Particular focus will be centred on large energy users who are expected to have greater volumes of potentially beneficial latency within their processes as well as a comprehensive presence across the affected areas.Initial work will be required to develop an attractive proposition that will be acceptable to I&C site operators to vary their electrical load so that it is more compatible with peak output from embedded renewables on the same 33kV feeders. It is expected that public engagement will be primarily direct to customers but aggregator routes will also be investigated to verify if they can meet the trial service requirements. The various methods will be applied over a two year trial period to establish the most effective when measured against the key criteria:

• Cost of operation

• Reliability / effectiveness

• Ease of participant recruitment

• Ease of ongoing operation.

Benefits

The success criteria will be assessed over four key performance indicators:

• Development of suitable proposition to present to customers along with associated contracts and public engagement collateral.

• Engagement of appropriate I&C customers with the ability to have the desired impact on network loads through behavior change.

• Demonstrable improvement in the currently experienced issues including high voltage, reverse power, power factor and thermal constraints.

• The services tested offer comparable or improved performance over conventional reinforcement
  • Speed of deployment

  • Reliability

  • Better value for consumers