The operational window for National Grid’s second successive demand turn up scheme has launched today.
Following last summer’s successful pilot, National Grid tendered for capacity once again and last month secured 138.6MW of additional demand from six parties at an average utilisation fee of £68.44/MWh.
The demand turn up scheme pays companies to effectively increase their consumption during times when supply might otherwise outstrip demand. National Grid can then procure that demand within a few hours’ notice if they project this to be the case, helping to keep transmission network frequency within the necessary range of 49.5-50.5Hz.
Companies successful in the tender receive a small availability fee of between £1.50 and £1.75/MWh throughout set availability windows as well as a submitted utilisation fee should their demand be sourced.
This year’s operational window runs from today (27 March) until 28 October 2017, with the daily availability windows set at 11:30pm – 8:30am in March, April, May, September and October, and 11:30pm – 9am in June, July and August.
On weekends and bank holidays there is an additional window of 1pm – 4pm.
National Grid also retains the right to secure extra demand outside of those windows should it see fit.
Speaking at this year’s Energy Storage Summit Paul Lowbridge, account manager for power responsive at National Grid, revealed that last year’s scheme had been “really successful” and resulted in more than 2GWh worth of balancing need being procured during July and August alone.
“Increasingly the baseload [during these periods] is made up of nuclear and some solar and wind generation, and what we did for the first time last year was define a service around actually being able to manoeuvre the demand curve up… as a lower cost alternative to curtailing low carbon generation,” he said.
This year’s scheme will be different however with additional, shorter-term contracts being auctioned each week to procure additional demand should National Grid forecast its need.
Lowbridge said at the conference that demand side response and storage technologies could find success during these auctions.