Local electricity networks should be forced to open up about the distributed energy resources they have access to, an academic from the University of Exeter has told Utility Week.
Greater transparency will be essential to the development of a smart, flexible and integrated energy system, according to professor of energy policy Catherine Mitchell.
Distribution networks operators (DNOs) currently have free rein to decide what information they provide to the rest of the industry and Mitchell said there isn’t an accepted methodology for assessing what distributed energy resources are available.
“It needs to be much more open,” she added. “You’ve got to know what the resource is and you can’t really have that if it’s not a regulated thing. So Ofgem has got to make these people, the DNOs, work out actually what the resource is.”
Mitchell suspects that many DNOs already have a fairly clear picture of the distributed energy resources, which are accessible through their networks but at the moment “there’s not really any value to them letting out that information”.
She said DNOs should not be allowed to find and reveal this information on their own terms and must be compelled to conduct a “thorough check on what they could have and what would be useful to them at different times of the day and at different places, whatever it might be”.
The professor was highly critical of the planned transformation of DNOs into distribution system operators, which she described as a “classic British fudge”. They should instead become distribution service providers (DSPs), which would not only procure flexibility services to deal with constraints but also balance the energy system at a local level through local energy markets.
Mitchell said establishing transparency over resources such as battery storage, demand-side response and flexible generation would be the key first step towards the introduction of a DSP model, as it would enable the rest of the industry to work out their potential value to the energy system. “You can’t really value it until you know what you’ve got,” she pointed out.
She continued: “Why it’s important to understand the DER value is because we’re trying to have more integration between electricity, heat and electric vehicles and we are also trying to be much more flexible so we can match that demand flexibility with the variability of renewable supply, and that happens at the local level really.
“Demand-side response is local, heat is local, all these things are local. So, the granularity of value has got to be right down in the distribution level.”
Creating local energy markets and providing the transparency needed to operate them efficiently would allow the UK’s energy system to be optimised from the “bottom up” rather than the “top down”.
Mitchell highlighted the work being done to transform grids in New York and California, where regulatory processes have already been put in place to establish what distributed energy resources are available, and called for Britain to do the same as soon as possible.