Flexitricity to give firms good reason to turn up the power
Footroom is designed to incentivise businesses by paying them for increasing their energy consumption after receiving an automatic notification informing them that wind generation is high, in an effort to prevent excess power from renewable sources being wasted and clean energy sites being paid for when they are not contributing to the electricity supply.
The scheme has been adopted under the Demand Turn-Up (DTU) service by the National Grid, which is set to be piloted in May this year, while Flexitricity has described the new scheme as the opposite to “headroom,” launched in 2008 to provide extra energy to the grid from industrial users when there’s not enough coming from traditional power stations.
Dr Alastair Martin, chief strategy officer at Flexitricity, emphasises how the scheme could lead to the UK getting a step ahead of other countries in Europe, while also helping to maximise the use of free wind energy.
"Footroom, or demand turn-up, offers tremendous potential to the UK – not only does it put the country at the very forefront of developing and implementing the grid of tomorrow, but it opens up a world of possibilities for business and for renewables developers," he said.
"With Footroom, businesses can boost productivity for minimal extra cost and are incentivised to do so. In turn, the grid can increase the amount of electricity distributed to homes from clean, renewable energy sources."
The initiative aims to better integrate renewable energy sources into the UK’s energy supply, along with making the energy going into the grid “cheaper and greener,” while limiting the expensive process of turning off wind farms by encouraging businesses to “change their consumption schedules or ramp up a process.”
Saskia Barker, Service Development Engineer at Flexitricity, explains how the company will inform firms of the rise in generation by installing an outstation at participating sites, which will send signals back to Flexitricity’s control centre in Edinburgh.
“When there is excess generation on the national electricity system, National Gird will issue a call to Flexitricity, and our system will send a signal to the outstation on site to reduce generation or increase demand. We’ll monitor site status 24 hours/day so that we can inform site staff of any problems, or prevent calls from being issued if core business would be affected,” she said in a blog post.
“For example, a water pumping station could run additional pumps during a demand turn-up event. The site would then have less water to pump later, so the pumping schedule for the rest of the day would be altered. Running more pumps might be less efficient, but as long as the losses are relatively small this method is an economic and environmentally sound way of balancing renewables.”
The new scheme follows DONG Energy’s recent announcement of a similar offshore wind energy generation management initiative, the Renewable Balancing Reserve service, which will aim to get businesses to change their power usage depending on real time deviations from weather forecasts.
