More growth for our flexibility market offering

Details of our new flexibility procurement round include five new locations and a further 44.55MW in requirement.

This brings our total flexibility requirement across our network to date up to 385MW across 52 locations in England and Wales.

For the first time, we are introducing a commercial requirement for one of the five new locations, Hawton in Nottinghamshire, where we are seeking a generation turn-down or demand turn-up service to meet an excess of generation in the area. To date we have been seeking generation turn-up or demand turn-down services to balance demand with network capacity.

WPD Network Strategy Manager Ben Godfrey said: “Our flexibility operations this year have given us an early view of how electricity systems might operate in the future, and shown that flexibility services provided by users connected to our network have helped keep the lights on. Flexibility service providers participating in this next round of procurement will add to our existing portfolio and will be rewarded for helping reduce the impact of decarbonisation.”

All of the zones in this latest procurement round have a need within 2020/21. We have also signposted ongoing needs to 2024/25. Our postcode checker is available to help interested parties determine if they have a suitable site inside our flexibility locations and our value calculator has been developed to help estimate anticipated revenue.

Full details of the requirements in each location have been published on the Flexible Power website. The information includes: zone locations, which months each zone needs flexibility, the required availability windows and the MWhs needed to be utilised within each month.

A procurement timeline has also been published;

• w/c 29 June – flexibility zones and supporting information published
• 3 August – Invitation to tender (ITT) issued to all participants who have registered their interest and passed a pre-qualification stage
• 11 September – ITT deadline
• 3 October – Procurement results.

Potential participants need to register their interest by responding to WPD’s procurement notice which is available here.

The Flexible Power team will be holding a series of webinars to provide further information on routes to procurement. If you want to be informed of Flexible Power’s activities or if you would like details of its information events you can register for updates here.