Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 3RD - 9TH APRIL 2020 | 13 Finance & Investment Smart Metering Systems (SMS) has acquired energy technol- ogy firm Solo Energy as part of a move into the aggregation market. Glasgow-based SMS, which also recently announced a partnership with sustainability fund Columbia Threadneedle, completed the deal in September 2019, but made the announce- ment only last Friday. Solo provides battery storage, ENERGY Smart Metering Systems moves into aggregation market micro-generation and electric vehicle chargers to homes and businesses at no upfront cost. It has developed a cloud-based aggregation platform called Flexigrid, which can co-ordinate the actions of a number of dis- tributed energy assets, allowing them to provide balancing and ancillary services as part of a virtual power plant. Solo's largest trial to date, funded by the government- backed Reflex scheme, is under- way in Orkney, Scotland. This trial aims to integrate electricity, transport and heat networks on the islands to balance supply and demand better. Tim Mortlock, SMS chief oper- ating officer, said: "By integrat- ing energy storage, renewable generation and vehicle charging into the UK energy system, Flexi- Eon-Kraken deal is major step for sector Deal to migrate Eon and Npower customers to Kraken platform could open up retail market Eon's plan to "reinvent itself " by creating new company Eonnext and using Octopus Group's Kraken customer service platform marks a significant step for the energy sector, a former Npower chief has said. The energy giant is the sec- ond UK retailer to license Kraken from Octopus, a"er Good Energy struck a deal to use the platform last year. Under the Eon deal, which industry sources estimate is worth £30-£40 million, Npower's customers will migrate to Eonnext in Q2 this year, while Eon's custom- ers will be transferred in 2021. Octopus aims to have 100 million customers on its platform by 2030. Paul Massara, who is part of Utility Week's new edito- rial board, said if the migration of millions of customers onto the Kraken platform is successful, there is scope for other larger players to enter the retail market: "If you have a platform like this, it could be applied to anybody. Therefore it reduces the barriers for new people wanting to come in. You could have an Amazon or a Google that says, I can use a platform like this, if it works and allows you to do different things. Until now it's been a tradi- tional SAP model, which has been very expensive and cumbersome. The proof will be whether they manage to move all those customers across successfully." Octopus Energy CEO and Kraken Technologies direc- tor, Greg Jackson, told Utility Week the company had been in talks with larger players. He said: "Octopus has been focused on building the technology that would help make energy cheaper, greener and with better service for customers. By the time we'd grown to more than a million customers, quite a lot of the incumbents started acknowledging that this was working." AJ ENERGY Network bottlenecks to drive "large rise" in constraint costs Payments to generators to man- age a bottleneck on the trans- mission network between Scot- land and England will surpass £1 billion in 2026, modelling by analyst LCP has suggested. For comparison, the electric- ity system operator (ESO) at National Grid currently spends £450 million a year managing thermal constraints across the whole of Great Britain. The report was released in response to the launch of the ESO's constraint management pathfinder in December 2019, which warned that "unless inno- vative solutions are identified and brought forward, the current network infrastructure cannot support the expected increase in renewable generation capacity". The pathfinder will look to secure 200MW of flexibility to manage constraints at the trans- mission boundaries between Scotland and England and the North of England and the Mid- lands. LCP said the project could save consumers £40 million a year, but this is "a relatively small impact" compared with the more than £1 billion its modelling suggests will need to be spent in 2026. "The reason this process is expensive is because when National Grid ESO turns a generator down on one side of a network constraint boundary, it has to turn another genera- tor up on the other side of the constraint to keep the system in balance," the report explained. "The generator being turned off gets compensated because it can no longer sell the power it promised to the market, and the generator on the other side of the constraint boundary gets paid to produce power. This is particularly costly when the generator being turned down/ off receives subsidies, because National Grid ESO must com- pensate the generator for its lost subsidy revenue." WATER Uncertainty to slow Water Plus recovery United Utilities has warned that a recovery plan for its business retail joint venture, Water Plus, has been thrown into uncer- tainty because of the impact of coronavirus on its customers. In a trading update ahead of its full-year results in May, United Utilities said Water Plus had been affected by the current economic climate, and despite making good progress, its recovery plan was expected to be slower, more challenging and "less certain". Jointly owned by United Utilities and Severn Trent, Water Plus recorded in its most recent financial results (to March 2019) a pre-tax loss of £1.4 million. It has also continued to receive sector-high levels of complaints, accounting for 45 per cent of all complaints in the third quarter of 2019/20. Massara: barriers to new entrants could reduce grid can help shape consumer demand to follow renewable energy supply, and help the UK transition to 100 per cent green power – as we are demonstrating under the Reflex Orkney project. "Flexigrid will enhance our ability to provide a com- prehensive end-to-end service proposition to our established industrial, domestic and energy services customer base." This week

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