exploring customer and network flexibility
In seeking better to understand customer flexibility, the key questions that we will address are:
- What are the most effective interventions to deliver this flexibility?
- What is the unit cost of delivering flexibility by each intervention?
- How does the volume of flexibility and its cost differ by network topology?
We will consider two aspects of network flexibility:
- Background flexibility, invisible to the customer; and
- Identification of interruptible capacity that can be offered to customers, with means to interrupt that capacity as required. This last overlaps with customer flexibility (learning outcome 2), as interruptible contracts for non-firm network capacity are valuable only to customers with flexible demand.
Again, we want to know how much flexibility is available and how much it will cost. This will allow us to compare novel and conventional network solutions to increasing headroom. We will first be able to see if novel network solutions are sufficient (i.e. can they create enough headroom to defer reinforcement for 5 to 10 years?) and are they efficient (i.e. is their cost less than the value of deferred conventional reinforcement).
This links to the assessment of future demand growth, and will be likely to have different outcomes on different parts of the network. A novel solution that increases headroom by 10% may be valuable on a primary substation where load growth is 1% per year. It is less valuable when a heat pump scheme takes utilisation of a secondary transformer from 75% to a projected 150%.