Date: 28/07/2024
Author: Kelly Prime
Bio:
Kelly Prime is an ESRC, SCDTP funded PhD student in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. Her research project considers the future of smart meters in the UK, their implications for energy justice and how policy may mitigate potential injustices in the future.
Introduction
How electricity makes it to our power sockets at home, exactly the right amount, at exactly the right time, has always amazed me. I remember watching a BBC documentary about the National Grid ESO Control Room where they talked about the “Great British Kettle Surge”; a phenomenon where millions of kettles are switched on during the ad break of large sporting events for example, causing a massive surge of demand that needs to be met by the grid.
Meeting the country’s energy demand starts well before the second that demand is matched by supply in the Control Room. Even years before a single kWh of electricity is used, energy markets begin the process of forecasting and agreeing contracts between generators and suppliers to meet the demand. This process is reiterated numerous times before the Control Room takes over to balance the electricity supply, with National Grid purchasing additional units of electricity to meet any shortfall.
How we generate electricity in Great Britian has changed substantially in the last two decades. Current market arrangements were adopted when electricity generation was provided by large, centralised, unabated fossil fuel-based generation. In 2000, only 2.63% of total electricity was produced from renewable sources, but this has risen substantially to 46.02% in 2023. In addition to the challenges that more unpredictable, smaller and distributed sources of renewable energy bring, markets are considering how they can encourage demand to change in order to meet supply. A reversal of our current status quo. An example of this is National Grid’s Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) which pays eligible consumers to turn down their consumption during periods of peak demand.
In April 2022, the Government launched it’s Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA). The purpose of this review was to ensure that the electricity system can transition to a decarbonised one, while maintaining affordability for consumers and security of supply. Through a UKRI funded policy internship at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) I joined the REMA team in September 2023 as they were working hard to publish their second consultation document.
At 161 pages, the REMA Second Consultation Document is vast and had numerous teams working on different aspects of this complex market, which then needed to be brought together in one cohesive document. I was placed with a team specifically focusing on distributed low carbon flexibility, such as DFS.
I spent much of my time speaking with various stakeholders and completing desk-based research into one small aspect of REMA; baselining. Baselining is used when an asset (a piece of technology which generates electricity or consumes electricity) is asked to turn up or down, and a payment is made to reflect the change in generation or consumption. In order to calculate payment, we need to know what the asset would have generated or consumed in the absence of the turn up or down instruction. The baseline method calculates this. My task was to better understand what baseline methods were currently used in energy markets and whether there was a case for standardising them.
I naively thought I would be able to solve the problem of what the best baselining method was. As time went on, I realised that the issue was much more complex than I had anticipated and I reached that point where I felt my efforts were futile and I seemed to have more questions than answers. It was only in my final week where I realised that my work would actually play a part in shaping the GB energy system. Yes, I only had more questions, but these questions were some of the right ones and helped set the direction of what the team would consider next.
Despite the complexity of this one subject, it only takes up three paragraphs in the substantial document. This gives some idea of how much work goes into producing a consultation document and how challenging the decarbonisation of our electricity system is.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to complete my internship at DESNZ. It gave me an opportunity to see what it was like working in Government, to help shape a tiny part of policy in a sector I have always had a huge interest in and to get greater context and understanding of the GB energy system for my PhD.
