Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/936447
NETWORK / 33 / FEBRUARY 2018 use and di erence in power. We've also got technologies like vehicle to grid where you can use that to sell power back to the grid, rather than just view it as a demand where you're tak- ing power o the grid." Cutting costs by managing local energy resources to create an e• cient, • exible system balancing supply and demand, for example by shi• ing peak consumption, could help avoid expensive network upgrades. But are consumers really interested in energy trading and how will it work? Explains Cardwell: "We think technology is going to be a big enabler. We don't think that customers are going to want to wake up in the middle of the night and start turning things on or o . Tech- nology is the enabler. It's a big disruptor for the sector but pro- vides a fantastic opportunity to give customers the ability to do things in an automatic fashion. They can participate in these markets but do it automatically. They can use technology and con… gure it to how they want to participate. We did a lot of trialling with solar PV custom- ers for solar panels and found that when a customer gets a bit of new technology which gives them some control over their energy they want to then engage with the system and use that to add value to their life." Cardwell believes that this type of proactivity is most likely to come through the use of elec- tric vehicles. He added: "The key transformational technolo- gies going forward are batteries and batteries in the form of electric vehicles. We're seeing that customers want to get more involved because they've got a much more material resource to participate. They've either got to buy more power or they've got some power to sell. And they've got the technology to enable them to do it. They've got a smartphone that links them to their vehicle and they can start to think about how to use that as a resource. It gives them both the interest, the capability and the tools to do the job." The rise in renewable energy Cardwell says that the rise in renewable energy is one of the drivers for why a smart • exible energy system is needed. "Some of the innovation work we're doing is looking at the impact of renewables and how we can add • exibility in combination with them to make sure we can accommodate even more of it in the future. Although we've accommodated an awful lot over the last … ve years, particularly with the rise of solar power, we still expect quite a bit to come forward. It hasn't stopped, it's going to con- tinue. As we get more on there we need to come up with new and smarter ways to get it onto the system without having to resort all the time to expensive reinforcement." Whilst Cardwell thinks there is a place for reinforcement, he says it's about a mix of solu- tions. "Conventional reinforce- ments and • exible solutions side by side. Flexible solutions can be technologies like storage or commercial arrangements like demand side response." Researchers at the University of Bath and Newcastle Univer- sity will develop models and laboratory demonstrations of distributed energy systems, lo- cal energy markets and network operations, tracking • ows of energy, payments and informa- tion. This virtual system will enable them to explore di erent approaches, using data from real networks, and will also allow them to develop strategies that may be used to coordinate network and market operations. "The great advantage we get from working with academic in- stitutions is that they're working on a number of similar projects and you get real bene… t of scale from that," Cardwell states. "What you can do in the lab is scale up. You might only have 50 or 100 customers working with you on a physical trial, but you can feed that into a computer and scale it up to thousands. "You can test all sorts of combinations and size of scale, where if you wanted to do that in the real world it would cost you a lot more money and more time and disruption. "The idea is that you can do it in a lab and come up with some really good validated evi- dence. This is about providing evidence for some of these big questions. Right now we've got lots of opinion, but we're quite evidence light. What we're try- ing to do is come forward with evidence and see if we can work with the physical trials." The future So what does Cardwell think the future energy market will look like? "We can't envisage what the future will look like but we've got to make sure we're embrac- ing it as it comes," he remarked. "Our part of the role is that we need to enable customers to use their technology and smart devices to access their value and allow them to do whatever they want to do with energy. "It's about making sure that we establish that physical trad- ing platform that allows them to access the market. It's increas- ingly semi-autonomous and automatic for them. It's as easy as possible. We're not backing certain technologies, it's open access. We're not discriminat- ing between customer groups. Everyone can get a shot whether you're a big corporate industrial customer or indeed a domestic customer."