Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) has been awarded £1.8 million of government funding to explore how the power grid responds to price signals.
The company received the grant from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) as part of the £11 million Power Forward Challenge – a joint initiative with the Canadian government.
SSEN said distribution network operators (DNOs) have previously relied on physics-based power systems analysis to assess how the electricity system reacts to events.
Project Merlin (Modelling the Economic Reaction Linking Individual Networks) will instead focus on “understanding the effect economics has on the physics, and how the physics constrains or facilitates the economics” – a discipline known as power system economics.
The project will be run alongside SSEN’s £40 million Local Energy Oxfordshire demonstration scheme, which seeks to test multiple aspects of the distribution system operator (DSO) role being adopted by DNOs.
Stewart Reid, head of future networks at SSEN, said: “Project Merlin is scalable and entirely interoperable. We are entering an incredibly exciting time for UK electricity networks and there are a range of projects undergoing that will help us understand how we deliver the system of the future.
“SSEN is committed to learning by doing and so the news that Project Merlin has received funding is fantastic, and I look forward to seeing the contribution it makes to the industries understanding of how power systems can respond to the price signals in a DSO world.”
Multiple partners will be involved. The Cimphony Concert and GridOS platforms developed by Open Grid Systems and Opus One Solutions respectively will be deployed on the local electricity networks in Oxfordshire.
The findings will be analysed by academics at the University of Oxford. Hydro Ottowa will disseminate them internationally and share those from a sister project in Canada.
Earlier this year, SSEN commissioned the consultancy Frontier Economics to devise a process for comparing the cost flexibility services against network reinforcements.