UK Power Networks has signed contracts for 18.1MW of flexibility worth £450,000 to companies including AMP Clean Energy, Limejump, Powervault and Moixa to help alleviate constraints on its network.
UKPN said in May the auction had been successful, but has now named contract winners.
The procurement process was the first commercial scale auction on Piclo’s flexibility platform and UKPN has signed a commercial agreement with Piclo to use the platform for further auctions.
The a commercial agreement already signed with SSEN, Piclo needs other flex providers to upload their asset data to its platform to take part in future auctions.
Piclo founder and CEO James Johnston said he was “thrilled” with the result, which follows “years of trials and ongoing development”. He said the auction “will be the first of many as distribution companies across the UK and even internationally take UK Power Network’s lead in enabling the shift to a smart, flexible, low-carbon power system.”
Sotiris Georgiopoulos, head of smart grid development at UKPN said distributed generation and demand-side response can “help us create an open, transparent and accountable new market for their services”.
He said all bids accepted “met our robust economic criteria” to ensure they were better value to consumers than traditional approaches of network reinforcement.
“Flexibility has a key role to play as we move towards a decarbonised, decentralised and digitised network that will offer significant benefits to our customers,” added Georgiopoulos.
UK Power Networks said in February that it has set aside £12m to buy flex, or demand-side response services. It is also attempting to widen the pool by reducing the minimum threshold to 50kW, enabling smaller assets to provide services, with Moixa securing a contract to deliver 50kW via a network of 50 household batteries.
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