Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | MARCH 2022 | 19 Generation tonne and it's now at 300,000 [£34,772], so it's gone up sixfold." Although this "dilutes down", Futyan says this has still had a signi• cant e• ect on bat- tery cell prices, which are double what they were a year ago, meaning "a full • nished sta- tionary storage project is probably up in cost by about 20%". He says project costs had halved over the past • ve years and the recent increase in battery prices has probably set back cost reductions by around two years. He believes this upward pressure on prices will probably persist for some time: "It takes years to bring a new lithium mine into operation so you have got a bit of a con- straint on the supply side. "And then on the demand side, it's really EV batteries that are the source of demand and the growth has been higher than people anticipated." "I guess there's a question of whether a price increase will correct that demand because EVs become too expensive but I'm not sure it's a materially suŒ cient compo- nent of the car cost to dampen demand." Furthermore, he adds: "I don't think the full e• ect of the six times increase in lith- ium has yet Ž owed through to cells because there's a time lag along the chain, so I think there are more price rises to come." Fortunately for the sector, Futyan says this development has coincided with a surge in revenues and growing investor con• dence over the future prospects for batteries. "What we're • nding is that even at cur- rent prices our investors can still make their economics work because of the expectation of future price volatility and the demand for grid services," he says. "And the value of grid services is so much higher than it was a year ago that the revenue side and cost side have gone up together, so I think we will continue to see investment in energy storage. "I think this boom of build-out will con- tinue. It just makes doing business extremely diŒ cult because it's a very volatile envi- ronment where as soon as you've lined up a deal across the whole supply chain, then the whole thing has to be torn apart and restarted and that's just made projects extremely challenging." He says the best market for batteries at the moment is Dynamic Containment, the enduring successor to EFR and the • rst to be introduced in the ESO's new suite of three frequency response services – the others being Dynamic Moderation and Dynamic Regulation. As the name suggests, Dynamic Con- tainment was introduced as the • rst line of defence to contain drops in frequency fol- A ddress management has always been a surprisingly diŒ cult task for utilities, with considerable risk involved in getting it wrong. With next- day switching requirements imminent, and a slew of supplier collapses creating more bulk switching events, the pressure is on utilities now more than ever to get a handle on the crucial operational issue. Make no mistake, address management is no easy task. Every six weeks in Great Britain, millions of new address records are created. This includes new developments, vanity addresses, changes of use and more. These are then typically captured manually, making it easy for errors, duplicates, and inconsistent formatting to creep in. The risk here cannot be understated. You may not mind if your bill is addressed to "1a Mainstreet" rather than "1 Mainstreet" if it still lands on your doormat, but what if it doesn't? Or your account is mistakenly assigned to another address or meter? One Glasgow woman was shocked to • nd her utility demanding £4,000 in unpaid bills – her meter had been misregistered to another address and she'd been paying someone else's bill for years. This is a risk to both the customer there, and utility in terms of reputational damage, lost revenue and • nes. Plus, things are only set to get harder. In 2021 alone, more than 4.3 million customers were displaced by supplier collapses. That creates an administrative whirlwind for the new supplier which must take on new customers in bulk and quickly reconcile them to their own systems and address formatting. When next-day switching rules • nally start to bite (and we expect them to imminently), then utilities will be hard pressed to maintain service levels. These are avoidable and unacceptable risks. So, what can be done? The single most e• ective thing a utility can do is to partner with a company that has been there and done¤that. Idox, via its Aligned Assets Platform, is the address technology partner to the Central Switching Service, and has worked with more than 100 large, complex organisations. Our technology helps utilities with an initial data reconciliation and clean-up process according to BS7666, assigns Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) and matches the relevant meters to the correct address. It then keeps those records current with ongoing updates from Ordnance Survey's AddressBase Premium dataset. In a stroke, utilities are ready for next-day switching and whatever else the future may bring, and are protected against avoidable errors that can cause real harm at a delicate time for the sector. Find out more: https://www. idoxgroup.com/expert-view/ EXPERT VIEW DINESH THANIGASALAM, HEAD OF SALES – ADDRESS DATA SOLUTIONS, IDOX Time to deliver: Next-day switching piles pressure on utility address management continued on p20

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