The electricity system operator (ESO) at National Grid has vowed to take the necessary actions to allow the power grid to run on entirely zero-carbon electricity by 2025.
These include reforming the markets for balancing and ancillary services and creating new ones for services such as inertia.
ESO director Fintan Slye said: “By 2025, ESO will have transformed the operation of Great Britain’s electricity system and put in place the innovative systems, products and services to ensure that the network is ready to handle 100 per cent zero carbon.
“Zero carbon operation of the electricity system by 2025 means a fundamental change to how our system was designed to operate, integrating newer technologies right across the system – from large-scale offshore wind to domestic scale solar panels – and increasing demand-side participation, using new smart digital systems to manage and control the system in real-time.
“We will identify the systems, services and products we will need to run a zero-carbon network and design the new competitive marketplaces needed to source these as efficiently as possible, from both new and existing companies.”
“Operating a zero-carbon electricity system in 2025, whenever there is sufficient renewable generation, is a major stepping stone to full decarbonisation of the entire electricity system,” he added.
The ESO, which is now a legally separate entity within the National Grid group, created a dedicated control room desk for issuing dispatch instructions for distributed energy resources earlier this year.