National Grid to pay customers to use excess power

National Grid will pay business customers to use more energy at times of excess wind generation, under a new system developed by demand response aggregator Flexitricity.

National Grid has signed up to the demand turn-up system, Footroom, which is an automated service that notifies connected businesses of an approaching increase in wind. Businesses can then increase demand and production while wind farm output is at its highest, receiving an additional payment from National Grid for doing so. This means National Grid can leave the wind generation running and avoid making controversial ‘constraint payments’, whereby wind farms are paid to close down when there is too much wind.

National Grid said: “The purpose of demand turn-up is to increase demand on the system at times of high generation and low demand. Primarily it will be used overnight to balance wind and interconnector flows on top of nuclear baseload.”

Flexitricity’s founder and chief strategy officer, Dr Alastair Martin, said: “Currently, when the wind is at its strongest, the grid turns large power stations down or off.  But it can’t turn down all of them, so sometimes it has to turn off some of the wind farms. 

“With Footroom, businesses can boost productivity for minimal extra cost and are incentivised to do so. In turn, the grid can increase the amount of electricity distributed to homes from clean, renewable energy sources.”