Crowdflex - Discovery

Project summary

CrowdFlex aims to establish residential flexibility as a reliable energy and grid management resource, establishing it alongside business as usual solutions such as network reinforcement or new thermal capacity, using system operational principles to develop a new digital service. CrowdFlex builds on a significant first phase, https://smarter.energynetworks.org/projects/nia2_ngeso001/, which sized the market opportunity and the viability of consumer response.

Name Status Project reference number Start date Proposed End date Expenditure
Crowdflex - Discovery
 Complete 10027180 Apr 2022 Jun 2022 £206,829
Summary
Problem Bring Solved
  • Predicting the current and future needs for domestic energy provision for heat, power, and transport, and how flexibility can reprofile these to support the power system. Building on CrowdFlex:NIA (which focused on residential loads and EV demand), this Project will also explore residential heat. CrowdFlex:Trial will assess how the impact of EV charging, heat pumps, and other emerging low carbon technologies on customers electricity bills can be reduced when consumers participate in domestic flexibility.
  • Coordinating energy transmission, distribution, and system operation. CrowdFlex partners represent stakeholders across the power system. CrowdFlex aims to develop commercial frameworks to allow the ESO and DNOs to coordinate their needs and transmit them to consumers via effective tariffs.
  • Planning future policy, regulatory conditions, and market designs to support whole system approaches. CrowdFlex will identify the market design of flexibility services that coordinate the needs of the ESO and DNOs, while lowering consumers' energy bills. CrowdFlex will align demand to variable renewable energy generation, reducing stress on the transmission and distribution networks.
  • Maximising efficiency in large-scale network and system investments by taking a whole systems view across generation and demand side changes linked to decarbonisation. Domestic flexibility will improve the efficiency of existing investments, deferring or avoiding investment in new network and generation capacity. These savings can be transmitted to consumers, reducing energy bills.