Skip to main content
Back to news & events

Latest Flexible Power news

Removing Barriers to Participation in Flexibility

We’ve reduced the minimum level of entry for flexibility providers. Following feedback from stakeholders, participation in Flexible Power now only requires a minimum asset run time of one hour, rather than the previous requirement of two hours. This reduction means that asset types that may have a restricted run time, such as energy storage, can now participate. We hope this will encourage further participation from energy storage owners, particularly within the domestic market.

In addition we also want to encourage low carbon technologies such as solar PV and wind to participate in Flexible Power.

At the beginning of 2019 we removed the minimum asset size for participation restriction, meaning any sized asset can participate either directly with WPD or via an aggregator. Flexibility providers to Flexible Power currently range from 6kW to 12MW and we hope these changes will lead to further participation from a wide ranging market demographic.

Flexible Power Procurement Update

We can confirm that following the completion of our latest flexibility procurement round we have awarded flexibility contracts totalling 119MWh. Click hereto see the results. 

Network Strategy Manager - Ben Godfrey said “The Results of this latest procurement round show a large increase in the amount of participants, proving confidence in DSO flexibility markets is growing and it’s evident that more providers are able to participate confidently in distribution flexibility”.

Summer Season Performance

While not as large as our winter flexibility needs, many of our flex zones had requirements over the summer season to support the network during planned maintenance periods and under postfault conditions.

From May through to September we purchased 1,670MWh of availability from contracted flex providers and dispatched a total of 204MWh.

All providers delivered reliably with an overall performance average of 93%.

Have Your Say!

WPD has been deploying flexibility through Flexible Power since the beginning of 2018. Over that time we’ve learnt a lot and have already implemented positive changes.

Now we want to improve our Flexible Power offering even further and we need your help. Respond to our short online survey and tell us:

  • How successful have we been in delivering flexibility so far?
  • What more should we be doing to make Flexible Power accessible and understandable?
  • Your experiences with flexibility: does it work for you?

The survey shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes and the responses you give us will help develop the future direction of distribution flexibility. Find it here.

Tagged under
  • DSO/Smart Networks