Our continued investment into flex market

We have launched our second flexibility tender of 2022 – our tenth since our 2018 decision to adopt flexibility into business as usual operations.

The current tender covers 47 locations, approximately a third of our network in the Midlands, South West and South Wales, which have a combined peak requirement of 278MW. The deadline for bids from potential flexibility providers is 2 September.

Using flexibility services, contracting with asset owners who can reduce their energy consumption or export energy at peak times when networks have high demand, is now widely practiced by all UK Distribution Network Operators as they increasing provide Distribution System Operator functions. We are leading the pack with our track record of contracting and operating flexibility to date.

Our Commercial Lead Helen Sawdon said: “It’s encouraging to see our contracted volumes increase year on year. Distribution flexibility is still an emerging market and these volumes give us confidence in its growth.

“As you would expect with a young market, we don’t always reach our required volumes of contracted capacity in every flexibility location but our operation of flexibility continues to increase. To date we have accepted availability of approximately 850,000 MWh and dispatched over 2,000 MWhs, giving a total investment into the market of over £1.1m.”

She added: “We are increasing our ambitions for flexibility, and are currently developing our systems and processes to meet the planned scale and improve the provider on-boarding experience.”

Full details of the tender locations and their flexibility requirements have been published to the Flexible Power website here.

Key dates for tender are: 

• 25th July - Invitation to Tender (ITT) opens 
• 2nd September - ITT deadline
• 3rd October - Publication of tender results 

Our flexibility team will be holding a webinar to provide key information to parties considering entering the tender on Tuesday 19th July at 2pm.