Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 8TH - 14TH FEBRUARY 2019 | 19 Operations & Assets Operations & Assets (cutting the cake) and Colin Corbally from Downing. Ellwood said he "hoped that this plant can act as a model and we can see more sustainable energy schemes rolled out across other military bases". The plans for the venture have been in development since February 2015 and involved the Defence Infra- structure Organisation, the part of the Ministry of Defence that manages the Defence Estate, Future Biogas, EDF Energy and Crown Commercial Services, the government's procure- ment agency. If you have an asset or project you would like featured in this slot, please contact: paulnewton@fav-house.com Opinion The grid itself needs to change Matthew Williams says the architecture of the electricity grid must change to accommodate distributed generation. U ntil recently the UK government's future energy plans relied heavily on expensive new nuclear power plants to provide baseload capacity as old fossil fuel plants shut down. This would also ensure grid stability to support increased intermittent and volatile renewable generation. However, the energy system is fundamentally changing and expensive nuclear power is no longer the answer. Over the past decade the rise of variable renewables has seen a significant amount of electricity shiΠaway from centralised thermal baseload generation, which traditionally provided the power and stability the system requires. At the same time, the cost of the energy pro- duced from renewables has dropped dramatically . So why has this transition to cleaner and cheaper electricity generation not brought lower prices for con- sumers? The answer is the electricity system itself. At its core, the electricity grid is no longer fit for purpose Рit was never designed for this new world of distributed renewable energy. Certain aspects of the future energy landscape are clear. Renewables are the future and they can ultimately lead to lower cost energy because effectively they do not incur any fuel costs. Other aspects are far less clear. How do we manage the delicate balance of supply and demand with such a large number of distributed variable and volatile genera- tion sources within a rapidly evolving energy system? A decade ago, the UK had only 80 points of generation to manage, today it has nearly one million. Our outdated grid, connecting all these points of generation and demand together, has fundamentally not changed in more than 100 years. It was designed for cen- tralised generation supply and balanced by the ability to control the flexible output of large generation plants. It is clear that a new approach is required if we are to achieve our goals for a reliable, affordable, decarbon- ised energy system. A system that is flexible enough to tolerate variations in generation and consumption; one that is as agnostic to technology as much as possible, to avoid path dependence limiting our future prosperity. To deliver clean energy at a low cost to consumers we need a new architecture for the electricity system, where the centre of control is the grid itself, rather than relying solely on balancing from dispatchable thermal genera- tion. This should be a common platform that delivers the flexibility and resilience needed for the future and caters for a variety of technologies and solutions. Matthew Williams, founder and chief technology officer, Faraday Grid

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