Octopus customers first to help ESO balance grid

The Electricity System Operator (ESO) has selected Octopus as the first supplier to take part in a trial which will use households to provide flexibility through the Balancing Mechanism.

Octopus customers taking part in the trial include those with smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, which will adapt their charging schedules in response to instructions sent from the ESO.

This initiative will be available to customers on the Intelligent Octopus tariff. The aim of the trial is to explore the feasibility of using batteries in EVs to balance the grid while they’re charging.

The technology automatically adjusts the charging schedule of the car in response to the ESO requests for more or less power. Kraken, Octopus’ tech platform, will connect to Octopus customers’ EVs and continually manage their response depending on changing grid needs while ensuring that charging targets are still met.

The number of EVs using Intelligent Octopus has grown by a quarter every month in 2023 and Octopus now has more than 100,000 drivers across its EV specific tariffs.

Alex Schoch, head of flexibility at Octopus Energy Group, said: “EV drivers on our Intelligent Octopus tariff now form the UK’s biggest virtual battery – and for the first time ever EVs have entered the Balancing Mechanism.

“Whilst we sleep, EV drivers are driving down grid balancing costs that are passed on to all customers – saving us all money. This is the ‘smart energy grid’ today – complete radicalisation of the way the system is balanced is here now.”

The trial, which is being launched through the Power Responsive programme and will run until April 2024, is part of a wider project to make operational metering standards for the Balancing Mechanism more proportional for small-scale assets.

The current standards require that assets must be metered with an accuracy of plus or minus 1% and a resolution of three decimal places. Readings must be taken once per second with a latency of less than five seconds. These standards also apply to sub-assets within a Balancing Mechanism Unit.

Explaining the importance of these standards, the ESO previously said large margins of error can create “poor situational awareness” for its control engineers, “leading to inconsistent dispatching.”

“It also leads to demand forecasting errors which results in more actions needing to be taken in the control room to manage the uncertainty, increasing balancing costs for all.”

For participants in the trial, the ESO is relaxing these standards for sub-assets with a capacity of less than 100kW that are part of aggregated units.

The accuracy requirement will be loosened to +/- 2.5% to align with both the Code of Practice 11 (CoP11) within the Balancing and Settlement Code (BSC) and the Measurement Instrument Regulations. The required resolution will change to 1kW, while the refresh rate will remain once per second for aggregate units but once every ten seconds for sub-assets.

The trial will be open to up to 50MW of flexible capacity and up to 10MW from each provider.

Claire Dykta, National Grid ESO head of markets, added : “Opening up access to the Balancing Mechanism for electric vehicles and other technologies is an important step for extending consumer flexibility in a net-zero world.

“This industry-wide trial will provide valuable information to our control room, to help enable the full time availability of electric vehicles in the Balancing Mechanism in future.”

Earlier this month, Flexitricity chief strategy officer Alastair Martin told Utility Week that the company was keen to be involved in the ESO trial.

In a separate trial, UKPN is looking at how electric vehicles parked in long-stay car parks can be used to provide flexibility.

The network operator suggests that 4.3GW of flexible electricity could be unlocked by filling up electric cars’ batteries in long-stay car parks when energy is cheap and demand is low and injecting power back into the system at peak times.