Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water has penned a new deal with Open Energi to provide up to 5MW of demand response services to help manage the peaks and troughs of energy supply and demand nationwide.
Following a successful trial, the not for profit utility, which serves three million people daily, has signed the agreement to adopt Open Energi’s Dynamic Demand technology. This acts as a distributed storage network, automatically adjusting the pumps’ power consumption within seconds to help manage fluctuations in the grid.
Instead of National Grid asking power stations to ramp up generation at times of high demand on the grid, Open Energi can ask Welsh Water’s pumps, as well as equipment from hundreds of other sites across the country, to power down temporarily.
Similarly, if intermittent renewable generation is particularly strong and excess power is supplied, Open Energi could bring demand forward to alleviate pressure on the grid and ensure no energy goes to waste.
In return, Welsh Water stands to benefit along with its customers as Mike Pedley, head of energy at Welsh Water, explained.
“We’re aware that this demand response is increasingly important to National Grid and therefore the UK to help keep the lights on but from our perspective it’s a potential way of getting more financial benefit from using our assets flexibly. If we benefit financially because of our not for profit model where all our profits get reinvested, then our customers benefit directly as well,” he said.
“We’re happy with the projected returns for us signing up this amount of assets for that part of the service.”
The system is completely automated and the adjustments are expected to have no impact on Welsh Water’s operations as the utility will set the parameters within which its demand response services can be used.
Chris Kimmett, commercial manager at Open Energi, said: “We’re delighted Welsh Water chose to partner with Open Energi and this is an important milestone as we continue to work closely with the water sector to deliver the scale of invisible demand response National Grid is looking for.
“The water sector consumes a lot of energy, but much of it is not time-sensitive, so there is huge scope for water companies to be flexible about when they consume energy and shift their demand intelligently.”
However, Pedley added that companies across other sectors could use demand response technologies to help both themselves and the National Grid.
“I would expect more companies to adopt this type of technology for some of their assets. Increasingly in the UK now, companies need to be prepared to use their assets as flexibly as possible and that both helps the country and helps the company,” he said.
Following the completion of the 5MW scheme, Welsh Water says it will consider the possibility of including more assets.
This article has been amended since its original release.
