National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) has revealed it is trialling a new reserve service aimed at unlocking spare flexibility from batteries as part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The service was proposed by battery operator Arenko which will be the sole participant in the trial. The company said it would be analogous to the start-up service for the balancing mechanism by which thermal generators are paid to make – and stay ready to respond to – requests for reserve.
Arenko made the proposition after the ESO published an open letter at the end of April announcing the launch of its new downward flexibility service. The letter also urged parties to come forward if they had they had spare flexibility to offer.
In further letter published today (18 May), the ESO said it had decided to trial the service over the next week: “This arrangement will see our control room signal an upcoming need for upward or downward reserve in a similar way as we would signal to a thermal plant through a balancing mechanism start-up contract or other operational arrangement.”
“Arenko will then submit bid offer acceptance prices for the nominated window,” the ESO explained. “The control room will then issue a net zero volume combination of bid offer acceptances to cover the nominated window, resulting in a pseudo-availability payment for the period.”
It continued: “Our intention with this operational arrangement is that it mirrors the instruction approach, availability payment and utilisation payment that is currently available to thermal plant.
“In doing this, we aim to gain greater understanding of how battery storage assets operate, how we can better access the flexibility that they can provide, and what operational processes and commercial structures would need to be in place to develop this into business as usual.”
National Grid said the trial will only involve Arenko due to the manual processes that will be involved in using and assessing the service but gave assurances that all of the findings will be made available to the rest of the industry.
Arenko Group chief product officer Andy Hadland said: “Batteries have a crucial role to help meet the ESO’s net zero operability ambition by 2025.
“We hope to open up new ways for batteries to provide services and competition to the ESO versus current methods using thermal power plants. This should ultimately reduce the cost of balancing the system and provide better value to the end consumer.”