The Department of Energy and Climate Change has said that demand side response, storage and smart network technologies are central tenets to its vision for a smarter energy system.
It has also announced that a consultation on smart energy systems is to be launched early next year with a response expected in the autumn which is hoped to set out the “future direction” of government policy.
Alongside policy decisions relating to the feed-in tariff and other renewable energy subsidies, DECC today released a policy paper entitled ‘Towards a Smart Energy System’, which included a raft of measures which it said would help deliver against objectives such as a cheaper and more flexible national grid.
It hailed demand side response, storage and smart network technologies as having the potential to help reduce system costs and potentially save the country “tens of billions of pounds” in grid upgrade or maintenance costs if used correctly.
With DSR and storage technologies yet to become completely commercialised – although 2016 is expected to be a breakthrough year for some – DECC has said smart meters are the “critical building block” for moving towards this flexible system. The government currently intends to have every home and business in the UK fitted with a smart meter before 2020 and earlier this month the European Investment Bank agreed to part-fund a push to accelerate installations throughout the next year.
However the paper has outlined several factors in which the government could improve its work. It notes “material barriers” to the deployment of technologies and states that DECC is to work closely with Ofgem in 2016 in order to help remove them.
Critical will be the role DECC can play in removing regulatory barriers to storage. Energy secretary Amber Rudd has recently began to drop hints that red tape around storage deployment could begin to fall next year and today’s feed-in tariff announcement included a pledge to consult on this in the spring.
The paper also states a previously released intent to begin to introduce half hourly settlements on energy bills for small, non-domestic customers. This is being designed to thrust more importance onto energy management and to tempt businesses to adopt DSR technologies in order to make potentially huge savings on their bills.
