Future energy
CrowdFlex innovation project announces final domestic…
3 Feb 2026 - 4 minute read
CrowdFlex, a NESO led innovation project, funded by Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), is…
Image
Innovation
As an independent public organisation, we work with innovators across Great Britain to solve the toughest problems we face as an industry. Given our unique position, we facilitate innovation across the whole energy system, and work collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders.
Submit a proposal
If you want to submit a potential innovation idea we'd love to hear from you, please submit using the button below and we will get back to you.
Due to an unprecedented number of inbound ideas, our response time will exceed the usual four weeks. Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Innovating to create value
Our innovative approach is already creating value, as these examples show:
- Accelerating the energy transition: We are applying transformational technologies to radically improve our analysis and forecasting, unlock more efficient operations, and support faster and more informed decision-making, all to further reduce system costs.
- Future markets to accelerate progress: Our coherent whole energy market strategy allows us to continually and collaboratively design and test market reforms so we can accelerate the energy transition and stimulate market competition.
- Improving constraint management: We are testing a range of approaches to economically mitigating limits on the amount of power that equipment can transmit.
- Examining system stability and resilience: Through knowledge and data sharing, we have improved our understanding of how and why the system may be affected by different factors, helping us reduce the impacts of increasing system complexity.
Exploring the Benefits of our RIIO-2 projects
Explore our interactive graphic that highlights the exciting benefits of our innovative projects under the RIIO-2 framework. You can easily navigate to view the benefits either by strategic priority area or by benefit type.
Innovation Benefits
Innovation projects
We have a portfolio of active innovation projects funded by the Network Innovation Allowance (NIA), Network Innovation Competition (NIC), Ofgem's Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and other research and development funds.
Distributed ReStart
Here you can find out about the Distributed ReStart project. Learn about the project’s benefits, its partners, and the workstreams that delivered its outputs.
Virtual Energy System
In 2021 ESO launched an ambitious, industry-wide mission to digitise our energy system. We call it the Virtual Energy System.
Crowdflex
CrowdFlex explores how domestic flexibility can be used in grid operations while empowering consumers to be active players in reducing their energy bills via new tariffs and incentives.
Artificial Intelligence and NESO
Here at NESO we embrace artificial intelligence across our entire organisation, with a view to openly collaborating with all industry participants. As we start to operationalise our AI models and research, we are looking forward to working with industry to capitalise on the latest technologies to invite collaboration and interoperability across GB energy and beyond.
Are you researching cutting edge applications or looking to find out more about what we are working on? Reach out to us at [email protected] or if you’ve got a world leading AI project idea and want to bring it to life, submit your idea and let’s get started!
