Future Flex

Completed

Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Energy Models)
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Energy Economics)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Systems Analysis related to energy R&D (Energy modelling)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Consumer attitudes and behaviour)

Project Contact
Western Power Distribution

Network Innovation Allowance

Ofgem

01 November 2019

01 December 2021

ENA months

£828,425

Power

South West

Network Innovation Allowance

Project Contact, Western Power Distribution

Future Flex is a participant-led trial of second generation DSO services, deploying step-change innovations for procurement, testing and delivery suitable for domestic scale assets. The project will focus on active power demand reduction services. The benefits will be increased market liquidity and competition – and resulting lower costs of flex service provision. The Project is scoped in phases, as logged below. 1. Participant engagement This data-gathering phase is the bedrock of the whole project, using workshops to secure meaningful, deliberated participant input, with follow-on semi-structured interviews, social media engagement and peer-review. At the heart of this phase is two intensive workshops, informed by best practice in workshop design – with upfront participant priming on key topics, and careful curation of agenda, invitee list and seating plan to ensure meaningful feedback. The workshop methodology is substantially more intensive and bespoke than is typically deployed in the energy sector; for instance, drawing upon priming theory from social sciences to set the interpretative frame – using an upfront written briefing and individual verbal calls prior to workshop delivery. Following the participant engagement we have three areas of work to progress:2A. DSO-ready homes This workstream will identify and deploy interventions in the customer journey to futureproof homes for DSO services. The objective is to deliver a set of costed interventions to make homes DSO-ready through adopting a customer-centric approach. 2B. Sustain-H Trial (with aggregated data sets) Implement a trial with different data options with energy suppliers and/or asset aggregators using the Sustain service as a test case. The objective is to demonstrate the provision of an inclusive DSO service, which is accessible to a broad range of domestic solutions, and is flexible on data provision. 2C. Pro Low Carbon Conduct analysis of carbon intensity of DSO services, with an emphasis on domestic flex. The objective is explore the impact of flexibility services to feed into wider policy/regulatory setting. The objective of the project is to understand current process limitations with regards to domestic flexibility providers with the aim to demonstrate and test solutions to those limitations.

Future Flex is a participant-led trial of second generation DSO services, deploying step-change innovations for procurement, testing and delivery suitable for domestic scale assets. The project will focus on active power demand reduction services. The benefits will be increased market liquidity and competition – and resulting lower costs of flex service provision.

09/11/22