Officials at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) are looking at ways to boost demand reduction, demand response and distributed generation, according to Barker.
Speaking at Marketforce’s Future of Utilities conference in London, Barker talked up the “D3 agenda” as a way of engaging consumers with the energy market. These are technologies that can be adopted by households, communities or businesses and erode the market for utility-scale generation.
“A new model will challenge the old,” said Barker. “This will mean a real challenge to those large utility-scale operators.”
Just 60MW of power generation capacity is community-owned today – “a tiny, tiny amount,” Barker admitted. According to Decc’s first ever Community Energy Strategy in January, this could rise to 3GW by 2020, or 1.4 per cent of forecast demand.
Meanwhile, initiatives to reduce electricity demand permanently or on demand are eligible to bid into the Capacity Market government is developing. However, critics say the market has been designed primarily to spur investment in new gas power plants.
Barker said Decc is doing more work to develop the role of the demand side in the Capacity Market.