Get Involved- Take part in flexibility market trials in Oxfordshire.

Note: As part of the recruitment process for trail participants; TRANSITION developed extensive resources, explaining key concepts of flexibility markets to a wide ranging audience. Our plain English explanations are a great resource for those interested in replicating our trials.

“In November 2021 we started our Flexibility Market Trials and are looking for businesses in Oxfordshire to get involved from May 2022.”

As well as providing an opportunity to be part of a cutting-edge project shaping the future of the electricity network and enabling the journey to net-zero, you could be paid for being flexible with your energy.

As well as running markets where flexibility is used to temporarily support your local electricity network, we are also enabling the trading of import and export capacities, allowing people with spare capacity to temporarily trade this with ‘network neighbours’.

We are looking for anyone who:

• owns or manages an electricity generation asset or storage (such as batteries) located in Oxfordshire; or who
• owns or manages a business in the county that could take part in ‘demand response’, temporarily altering your electricity consumption (up or down) to support your local network; or who
• is a business interested in selling or buying spare import or export capacity (find out more about this)

The trials will help us to design the flexibility markets of the future which will free up space on the network for low carbon technologies and enable Distributed System Operations.

The TRANSITION project is carrying out these trials in Oxfordshire as part of Local Energy Oxfordshire.

What are the requirements for taking part in the market trials?

This depends what sort of trades you want to take part in.

Option A ) – selling energy flexibility (turning up or down your generation or demand temporarily) to your Network Operator, or

Option B ) – selling or buying spare import or export capacity with your network neighbour. This is called a Peer to Peer capacity trade. 

You can chose to do either A or B, or a combination of both of these types of trading.

• For option A  you will need to be able to turn your energy consumption, or the generation of your asset (or battery dispatch) up or down on request. For Option A you need to be able to do this with 12 hours’ notice or shorter.
  For Option B, whether you need to be able to do this or not (and the notice required) will depend on whether you are buying or selling. The seller may not need to make any change at all.
• For option B you will need to have a copy of your connection agreement and if you wish to exceed your stated capacity you will need permission from the Network Operator (SSEN) to do this. If you are selling your spare capacity you will need to be certain you only sell what you have to spare. You may only have this spare capacity to trade at certain times of the day/week or during specific weather conditions.
• Both options A&B require you to have at least 30 minute monitoring

We are only able to invite commercial companies/businesses to take part in the trials – they are not directly open to domestic participants. Domestic customers can however take part through a flexibility aggregator which is a business that acts as an intermediary. Contact us if you would like us to put you in touch with one of the aggregators participating in our trials.

What could you earn from taking part?

What you could earn will depend on the option(s) you choose, the assets you have, their capacity, the number of services you take part in and various other factors

Option A – you could be paid up to £1200/MWh for supplying flexible energy to support the network. We will offer fixed price options (see below) for those looking for certainty from the market and auctions for those looking to optimise their market position.
See what the maximum is we will pay for different services here.

Option B – the price is agreed between the two peers trading their capacity, so it is up to them to agree this.

Market stimulation packages

We are keen for as many people and individual assets to be able to take part in our flexibility market trials in Oxfordshire as possible.

For those interested in Option A, we have developed two ‘Stimulation Packages’ that will offer more financial certainty than a traditional competitive auction environment and that supports investment in your assets so you are eligible to take part.

Find out more here.

Market stimulation packages will no longer be available as the project has entered trial period 3.

What next?

Before getting in touch with us to express an interest in taking part in our trials please be sure to check;

• you meet our eligibility criteria above (or could do with a little capital investment)
• your asset is within our trial areas

We are currently developing further materials for this website in response to customer needs and will be building a set of FAQs from the questions we receive.

If you are interested in taking part please complete our expression of interest form. – LINK NOW DEACTIVATED

You can also watch our presentation on the Market Trials given at the 2020 Energy Networks Innovation Conference.