Unanswered questions remain over who bears responsibility for network outages resulting from the failure of flexibility providers to meet their commitments, an industry figure has warned.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks’ (SSEN) head of asset management and innovation, Stewart Reid, highlighted the problem today (23 May) during a presentation on smart grids and flexibility markets at Utility Week Live.
“Who’s responsible for market-driven overloads?” Reid asked the audience. “That’s a big question.”
He continued: “At the moment, if the power goes off it’s generally the result of a pole falling over – or a JCB knocking it over more typically.
“In the future, there could be power outages as a result of someone in the marketplace not actually delivering what they’ve been contracted to deliver in terms of load reduction or load increase.
“Who’s accountable for that and how do you manage that?”
Reid said the issue is “one of the big conundrums and regulatory challenges” of the transition to a distribution system operator (DSO) model for local networks.