Electricity North West has unveiled that over £10 million has been made available in order to facilitate the creation of a gigawatt of flexibility from 2023-28 across 30 locations in the North West.
The company explained that this is the 11th and largest tender in the business’ history, highlighting the need to expand flexibility services.
To develop this tender, Electricity North West called on stakeholders earlier this year to help shape its first ever distribution flexibility procurement consultation.
The consultation aimed to give stakeholders a voice in developing flexibility markets by seeking feedback on its process for signposting, procuring, dispatching and settling flexible services.
As part of the Distribution Flexibility Procurement Statement, the consultation would help to better understand customers’ views allowing the company to be more informed during future tendering rounds. The knowledge uncovered via this consultation has now been applied to the latest tender.
“Following our consultation in September, we have published half hourly forecasts of our requirements for the next five years within our Autumn tender. This allows us to offer longer term flexibility contracts to providers and demonstrates our commitment to transparency and market engagement,” said Lois Clark, DSO commercial manager at Electricity North West.
“We also responded to customer feedback calling for a more streamlined approach for submitting a tender response and we worked with PicloFlex to integrate the pre-qualification questionnaire onto the platform which will allow providers to complete all steps of the procurement in one place.”
In late 2021, the group announced it would expand its operations by launching a new Middlesbrough-based subsidiary, Electricity North East (Construction & Maintenance), to support its clients across Yorkshire, Teesside and Northumberland.
The subsidiary provides high and low voltage construction and maintenance services to companies that operate private high voltage electricity networks.
Electricity North West also joined the UN-backed Race to Zero campaign in August 2021 committing to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
