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Reducing demand for electricity could help to balance the UK’s power system as much as five times faster than firing up a thermal power plant as supply margins shrink, according to new research.
Currently National Grid keeps power supply and demand balanced by reacting to demand fluctuations by managing the output of thermal power plants. But research from demand side response (DSR) developer Open Energi says the same effect could be achieved in a fraction of the time.
Field tests showed that full response could be provided in less than two seconds, as compared to 5 – 10 seconds for a thermal generator.
DSR is increasingly accepted as a cheaper way of balancing the grid rather than investing in capital intensive centralised generation or using older uneconomic plants. But the case for using DSR is further supported by the speed of its response time as unpredictable renewables playing a greater role in the generation mix.
“While most people are focusing on the tight capacity margin, the bigger threat could come from generators being unable to respond within the required window to balance sudden shifts in supply and demand,” said Open Energi’s commercial manager Chris Kimmett.
“With more renewables and decreased thermal generation, ‘inertia’ on the Grid will decrease, making frequency more unstable. To counteract this effect we need faster response, so by rolling out Dynamic Demand today we are future proofing the Grid,” he added.
National Grid’s head of commercial operations Duncan Burt told Utility Week in June this year that it is preparing to revolutionise how it maintains secure supply by relying on demand-side measures for “well over 50 per cent of the time” by 2030.
In the next five years National Grid says it will work with commercial and industrial energy users to “normalise” the use of demand-side response before engaging with the domestic sector to broaden the scale of flexible demand capacity.
“Even three years ago I would not have said that demand-side response would play as big a role as we expect it to now,” he said at the time.
National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios report published earlier this year indicates that by 2020 small-scale, distributed generation will represent a third of total capacity in the UK.
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