Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 15TH - 21ST NOVEMBER 2019 | 19 Operations & Assets are going to provide what service and can check them individually to make sure they can deliver. "What happens when you've got a port- folio of distributed assets?" he asks. "If I've got 10,000 washing machines that I've aggre- gated up, I don't know which ones are going to deliver, but I know by averages and by portfo- lio statistics that at any one time, 4,000 of the 10,000 will respond to a signal." They will instead have to put their faith in type-testing, monitoring and the law of large numbers: "As long as you've got good performance monitoring and the DSR provider is actually providing the ser- vice that you want it to, it doesn't really mat- ter what asset it comes from. "Most of that is moving forward, but it takes a long time," Parfett remarks. "[Market operators] have got to change a lot of processes." Regulatory changes He also highlights a number of regulatory changes that are being considered or imple- mented; for instance, the Balancing and Set- tlement Code (BSC) modification P344, which was approved by Ofgem in August last year. The modification created a new type of BSC signatory called a virtual lead party, which will be able to form aggregated balanc- ing market units without being the registered supplier for the sites they are aggregating or holding a supply licence at all. Along with the Grid Code modification GC0097, which allowed sites to be aggre- gated across a wider geographical area, this should open up the valuable balancing mar- ket to virtual power plants. Code administra- tor Elexon began registration in March, but there are not yet any companies operating as virtual lead parties. Then there is P379, which is currently undergoing assessment and seeks to further reform the supplier hub model by allowing consumers to buy and sell power through multiple entities by way of metering splitting. "At the moment, you're quite constrained in what you can offer," says Parfett. "That opens up a range of new business models and it means you can do those things without needing permission from the main supplier." Working together Daniel Mee, systems architect at the Energy Systems Catapult, says there is also lots of work to do to make different technologies and devices work together: "In my smart home, I want to balance my heating and my EV [electric vehicle] charging, using the bat- tery that's trickle charged over the day and maybe self-consuming from the solar panels on my roof." At the moment, he says "everything is being done as a vertical slice going back up to the cloud". Mee says this could create problems in the future: "The obvious example is that if the smart charger that's charging your vehicle doesn't have the hardware capability of talking to devices in your home but only upwards to the cloud, then in three or four years, trying to integrate across is going to be a lot more difficult than if you built that in at the beginning. "If you look at the other industries like mobile telephony or the internet or any of those emergent digital areas, the lifecycle of the technology is much shorter," he adds. Many consumers replace their mobile phone every few years. "But I would proffer that chargers bolted to the house, your heating system in your house, that's going to be a ten-year lifecycle, so your opportunity to iterate is lower. They tend to get replaced as a necessity when it breaks rather than as a lifestyle choice." Promising area One area that appears particularly promising is EV charging, which can easily be shiœed to different parts of the day but will create significant extra costs if it takes place during peak hours. Customers on Octopus's Agile tariff can already smart charge their vehicles if they have the right equipment, and both itself and Ovo are offering their customers vehicle- to-grid charging on a trial basis. Mee says EVs are a "great place to start" because they bring "obvious benefits to consumers straight away". He says obtain- ing flexibility from EVs is "more urgent and more doable" than from appliances, adding: "If you learn the lessons right from that, you can maybe apply them to heat." It may be further behind, but Neal Coady, director of technology for home energy management at Centrica, says the adoption of low-carbon heating will also "naturally play into flexibility because you've got big loads there once you electrify heat to a greater or lesser degree. "You've really got to start worrying about flexibility, otherwise you're going to need a lot more power stations." The company recently received approval from the electricity system operator to provide frequency response using hundreds of smart water tanks installed in customers' homes. Coady says consumers are increasingly concerned about climate change and willing to make changes to help decarbonise the energy sys- tem, but the industry must make it easy and simple to do so: "You could buy a heat pump or a bat- tery or solar panels and install them, but then you're kind of on your own. "People want to do something about decarbonising their energy, but when they start Googling and digging into it, they just get hit with a whole flood of stuff they don't really understand." Both on stage and behind the scenes, there is a lot leœ to do. Tom Grimwood, energy correspondent, Utility Week "You've really got to start worrying about flexibility, otherwise you're going to need a lot more power stations" NEAL COADY, DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY FOR HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT, CENTRICA

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