Introduction to the TRANSITION project
The world of electricity is changing and there are a number of significant challenges to the traditional method of distributing energy.
These challenges and the opportunities they offer us in the decarbonisation of the electricity network are explained in this animation produced by SSEN.
The key barrier to deploying flexible energy solutions at the scale needed is the absence of the markets and platforms necessary to integrate these components into a system – a system in economic, technical, societal and commercial terms. The shift from the traditional DNO model to a DSO model will be crucial to this change.
Extensive trials have been funded nationally and internationally to understand the efficacy of a range of solutions (technical, commercial, regulatory and behavioural) and we now know that we have the key elements to meet these challenges.
Open Networks has been endorsed in the UK Government’s recent “Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan”(1). Open Networks has already defined a DSO and the key functions and competencies that a DSO will require.
TRANSITION will explore several models with reference to “price flexibility (occurring when any party varies its demand or generation in response to the price of energy, and network use at a particular time and/or location)”, and “contracted flexibility (where parties trade and directly contract with one another to procure flexibility)” as defined in the “Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan”. There are different actions to achieve prices which reflect the value of the service to the wider system (‘system value pricing’) for different types of flexibility.
One of the key outputs from Open Networks will be a Smart Grid Architectural Model of the key elements of a DSO; this will include the NMF Platform. This Platform will be market agnostic but will provide the information and visibility necessary for a range of markets to operate. To use a very simplistic analogy, the relationship between the DSO and other Market Participants can be considered similar to that between the postal service and online retailers such as Ebay or Amazon.
