Surge in household flexibility reported in our latest tender for flexibility services

The results of our latest tender for flexibility services has seen a surge in domestic properties being signed up to provide the service.

Over half of the contracted flexibility secured in the latest tender comes from domestic flexible demand – households that can reduce or defer their electricity consumption during times of high demand on the network.

Our continued procurement of demand response services has boosted our flexibility operations by a further 253.6MW. The results of our latest tender have been published on the Flexible Power website.

Distribution System Operations Manager Ben Godfrey said: “A good example of how domestic consumers can benefit from participating in flexibility is where owners of electric vehicles can reduce their rate of charge, or choose to charge at times outside peak demand.

”152MW of the contracted flexibility in this round came from flexible domestic demand offered through electricity suppliers and aggregators. This is a notable increase from previous rounds and is really encouraging, we hope to see household participation continue to grow.”

To date, we have awarded contracts totalling 709MW for the provision of services within 62 constraint locations where this flexibility is being used to actively support the network and meet the increased growth in the consumption of electricity as the UK seeks to decarbonise heat and transport to meet net zero targets.

We have now published a timeline for our next cycle of procurement:

• 10 January 2022 – Flexibility requirements published
• 7 February 2022 – Tender opens
• 18 March 2022 – Tender deadline
• 18 April 2022 – Publication of tender results

Flex providers who are interested in participating in this round need to register their interest by responding to our procurement notice which is available here.