Carter Bouley's overview of National Grid's quarterly balancing event.
I attended National Grid quarterly balancing event yesterday. It was great to hear about the technological developments taking place in the control room. Increased automation should lead to more efficient dispatch of flexible assets, generating both a better deal for customers and a return for investors. Future market signals will be far more varied and frequent, revealing the value of developing automated solutions for optimisers.
It is especially useful to meet others working in the battery storage space, and learn about the challenges other operators are currently facing. The event was National Grid ESO giving an update on their strategy to redevelop the operations of the control room and #balancingmechanism.
The current process was not designed for the influx of smaller BMUs that are being registered. Manual control and optimisation by engineers mean that dispatching multiple units is time-consuming – time which sometimes the control room does not have.
They are building a new software platform which will help to change this and design it more modularly to allow new updates in the future more easily, with an overall target to reduce balancing costs and provide better value for the end consumer.
The event yesterday was part of a program which co-creates the solutions with industry, to ensure actors who will use these systems help to design them. It’s great to be able to feedback before a product goes live, to help ensure the day 1 product is usable from the start.
The most exciting near term changes are the bulk dispatch system, which uses an optimiser to assign multiple bids and offers across the available small BMU stack automatically, for one settlement period. These are then reviewed by an engineer before being dispatched. This will reduce the level of manual work, freeing up time, and should in theory make more use of smaller, and quick response assets.
Overall, skip rates have been central to the discussion, and several engineers there agreed that in order to make the most optimal use of assets on the system (and reduce these), they require the right tools and visibility to make those decisions when they are time critical.
With more and more automation developing in the markets, our own automated tools are well placed to receive these increased levels of balancing signals, respond quickly and reliably at scale, and enable our assets under our control to help secure the system.
This is a good step in the right direction, so we are looking forward to the software release at the end of this year, and will be engaging in future consultations to help provide the control room more visibility over our assets. In particular, state of charge and duration limits are key factors which should be available to the control room to enable them to make the best decision.