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NETWORK / 10 / SEPTEMBER 2019 POWER OUTAGE Simon Daniel, CEO of Moixa, discusses the reasons why the industry must move away from old ways of thinking when it comes to power outages. The role of back-up power such as frequency response in ensuring the resilience of the electricity system is a key focus of Ofgem's investigation into the 9 August blackouts. While this is welcome, the regulator should go further and ask if enough is being done to build a truly fl exible and responsive system. We need a network that can affordably cope with the UK's rapidly changing energy demands as we transition to a zero-carbon economy. We know that Little Barford power station and Hornsea offshore wind farm tripped almost simultaneously, taking more power off the system in an instant than National Grid held in reserve and triggering automatic cuts to more than one million homes – a once in a decade event, we are told. Of course, grid stability issues do happen. But it's critical to ensure that the system is fl exible enough to cope in the instant an issue occurs. So far, the post-event debate has focused on 'more of the same' – procuring greater volumes of reserve power, whether from big grid-connected batteries to gas 'peaking' plants. This is old thinking – looking to large and costly infrastructure to solve the problem. We should be looking to the future, at harnessing the potential of decentralised energy resources to provide dynamic fl exibility. Here, combining electric vehicles, domestic consumer generation and home batteries with intelligent energy management software can deliver aggregated virtual power plants (VPPs). Utilising consumer generation and demand could deliver the fl exibility needed to balance the system in real time. This dynamic fl exibility will mitigate the impact of generation failures like last week without the expense of building new large-scale infrastructure or holding generation in reserve "just in case". Imagine millions of homes generating, storing and exporting energy to the grid. Utilising artifi cial intelligence software, they manage their individual power needs and collectively can export power or defer demand in an instant, when called on by the network operator to balance the system and avoid future blackouts. VPPs at this scale could provide gigawatts of capacity and act as virtual interconnectors, ensuring regional and nationwide system reliability and delivering a stronger, cheaper and cleaner network. In Japan Moixa already manages and optimises over 80MWh of household batteries that are ready to be used for grid services when needed. This is already becoming reality. In the UK, Moixa is linking smart home solar batteries through its GridShare software platform in homes in Sussex to deliver domestic fl exibility to UK Power Networks. One of the fi rst UK partnerships to provide fl exible capacity to a local power network from home energy storage, it shows how new thinking can unlock the potential of consumers to deliver a resilient energy system. All that is needed is the right framework to deliver domestic fl exibility at scale. Achieving this requires action today. Ofgem, National Grid and DNOs will act to increase network resilience in response to the recent blackout. As they do so, it is critical that they stay ahead of the curve by procuring and trialling new fl exibility solutions now, so that the right framework is in place for the transition to a net-zero economy. and these automatically kicked in to recover the frequency and ensure the safety and integrity of the network. The report added that the system "au- tomatically disconnected customers on the distribution network in a controlled way and in line with parameters pre-set by the distribution network operators." In this instance c. ve per cent of GB's electricity demand was turned o• (c. 1GW) to protect the other 95 per cent. National Grid described the incident as "an extremely rare and unexpected event" and something that has not happened in over a decade. According to the report, the disconnec- tion of demand along with the actions of the ESO Control Room to dispatch additional generation returned the system to a normal stable state by 5:06pm. The DNOs then com- menced reconnecting customers and supply was returned to all customers by 5:37pm. The blackout caused major travel disruption on the rail network while other facilities were a• ected including Ipswich hospital and Newcastle airport. The report, which was submitted to Ofgem on Friday 16 August, insists that the transmission system operated in line with security standards and the Grid Code. National Grid will submit a nal report by 6 September and this will seek to un- derstand the exact failures at Little Barford and Hornsea and update on work with the distribution network operators (DNOs) to review the impact on demand and priority of disconnections. Ofgem's investigation will initially focus on NGESO's requirements to hold su™ - cient back-up power to manage the loss of generation supplies both in terms of inertial and frequency response. It will also examine whether distribution network operators complied with their Low Frequency Demand Disconnection (LFDD) obligations and the circumstances leading to the loss of power to critical infrastruc- ture. Ofgem will be looking at whether the companies made the right decisions both in the numbers of customers disconnected and whether those customers disconnected were the right ones. Ofgem is also supporting the govern- ment's Energy Emergencies Executive Com- mittee investigation. Jonathan Brearley, Ofgem's executive di- rector of systems and networks, said: "The power cuts of Friday 9 August caused inter- ruptions to consumers' energy and signi - cant disruption to commuters. It's important that the industry takes all possible steps to prevent this happening again. "Having now received National Grid ESO's interim report, we believe there are still areas where we need to use our statuto- ry powers to investigate these outages. This will ensure the industry learns the relevant lessons and to clearly establish whether any rm breached their obligations to deliver secure power supplies to consumers." manage the frequency were used (this in- cluded 472MW of battery storage). However, the scale of generation loss meant that the frequency fell to a level (48.8Hz) where secondary backup systems were required to disconnect some demand (the Low Fre- quency Demand Disconnection scheme) A virtual solution to grid fl exibility