National Grid head of electricity network development Julian Leslie was quoted as saying: “At the moment we are spending around £1 billion a year and ever-increasing, and I think personally by the next five years or so that will be £2 billion a year.
“This market of flexibility, providing these services to us, is only ever going to increase as we get to a more and more complex network with more distributed generation.”
Leslie attributed rising balancing costs to the growth of renewables. “In the past we got grid services for free,” he said, giving the example of the system inertia which is provided by synchronous forms of generation such as coal and gas-fired plants.
“As we move away from that we are having to put a value on inertia, which we never had to do before,” he added.
National Grid spent £1.043 billion on balancing services in the year to the end of March, up from £989 million in 2014/15 and £1.002 billion in 2013/14.