Flexible Load Opportunities in GB and EU markets

Maximising Revenue with Load Flexibility and Batteries

Flexible load has become an essential tool for balancing the grid and managing energy costs. In recent years, the UK’s National Electricity System Operator (NESO) has championed innovative incentives, giving businesses, homes and industrial sites opportunities to save money and keep the grid supplied by reducing demand during peak times through their Demand Flexibility Service. However, with the new winter season, NESO has transformed its Demand Flexibility Service into a dedicated market—with significantly lower remuneration levels. You can find more details in our Industry Insights section.

Demand flex events aren’t the only way to make money from flexible assets. Flexible energy generation or consumption also opens the door to more direct wholesale or ancillary service market participation. This could be via assets directly trading shifted energy, or indirectly by supporting on-site load and therefore reducing grid demand. Flexible generation assets such as battery storage can also participate in ancillary service markets to help stabilise grid frequency. 

This week’s video takes a closer look at the revenue potential of batteries in European ancillary markets. These systems can operate behind-the-meter or at a utility scale where they are independent from on-site load, and focus more directly on vital grid services like frequency response and reserve capacity. We’ll walk you through how to model these projects in Gridcog and optimise their revenue streams.

Whether it’s behind-the-meter or front-of-meter, leveraging load flexibility and batteries is a powerful way to tackle grid challenges and unlock new revenue opportunities. Watch the video to learn how you can optimise these strategies for your energy site.

Industry Insights: UK NESO’s new Demand Flexibility Service design goes live

In the UK NESO has announced the launch of an updated Demand Flexibility Service (DFS), set to go live today. This revised DFS transitions from a winter contingency measure to a year-round commercial service, aiming to enhance grid flexibility by incentivising consumers to adjust their electricity usage during periods of high demand. 

The scheme is transitioning to an in-merit service, meaning it now competes directly with other commercial tools in the electricity market, such as the Balancing Mechanism. Although this change allows providers and their customers to stack the service with other revenue streams, shifting to an in-merit service is likely to reduce volumes in the short term as the incentive for consumers to respond and turn down their load will be much lower.

For context, when DFS first launched it cleared at £6000/MWh later lowering to a competitive bid stack with bids often in the £2000-3000/MWh zone, moving to in-merit we would expect this to often clear around £500-750/MWh.

Product Corner: Multi-market trading

In many European countries, there are multiple Wholesale markets to trade your energy in, such as the Day-Ahead Hourly, Day-Ahead Half-Hourly and/or Intraday Auctions or the  Intraday Continuous  markets. When modelling a multi-market set-up, it is important to reflect the order markets can be traded in and churn. Churn is the act of buying and selling between markets in such a way that the original position is completely or partially undone. Both, order and churn can be configured within Gridcog.

The Gridcog Energy Industry Team has recently added Germany, Belgium and Netherlands Intraday Continuous market prices from EPEX into our Wholesale Energy library items. Now, each time you model in these geographies, our seed projects have these markets included and you can start modelling multi-market trading immediately.

Scaling Second-Life EV Battery Storage with Gridcog

We were delighted to sit down with Connected Energy recently and discuss their journey working with Gridcog this year. 

Since its founding in 2010, Connected Energy has focused on developing sustainable battery energy storage systems (BESS) by repurposing second-life electric vehicle (EV) batteries. As they expand to megawatt-scale projects, Gridcog’s modelling tools are helping them optimise systems, unlock new revenue streams, and scale with confidence.

“Behind-the-meter projects are a huge opportunity, and Gridcog is a key part of unlocking that potential for us,” says Robert Moore, Chief Business Development Officer.

Read our latest case study to see how Gridcog is powering their ambition to deploy 300+ MWh of storage by 2028. 

That’s all for this week. If you’d like to see how Gridcog can model your energy projects, click here to book a call with our team.

Or, if you have any interesting project use-cases you’d like to see modelled in Gridcog, email our marketing magician dan.pearson@gridcog.com and we’ll spin it up!