A “UK first” product is set to deliver more than 400MW of additional electricity capacity, as UK Power Networks announces the results of its latest flexibility tender.
The new product is enabling UK Power Networks to efficiently connect more renewable energy to the network and avoids spending “substantial sums of customer money” on major network reinforcement for capacity that may only be needed for a few hours a year.
For the first time, UK Power Networks has awarded contracts to distributed energy resources and aggregators to increase demand or turn down supply during periods of excess power.
The flexibility tender attracted more than 1000MW of flexible capacity against requirements of 426MW, providing competition that will drive down costs.
As it has done previously, UK Power Networks also procured flexibility to turn down demand at times of peak consumption.
In April this year, UK Power Networks established itself as the UK’s first independent Distribution System Operator (DSO).
The DSO has committed to saving customers £410million over the next five years by using flexibility to deliver capacity on the network at lower cost than building new infrastructure.
The company’s latest tender round saw it seek bids for flexibility from 1037 sites, up from just 28 in its first ever flexibility tender in 2018.