Swedish utility Vattenfall has entered the UK business energy supply market. The state-owned firm will start supplying wind derived power from October this year and is now stepping up UK customer acquisition.
Vattenfall currently operates over 500MW of offshore wind in UK waters, as well as around 110MW of onshore wind. It aims to have 1GW operational by 2018, a significant chunk of which will come from the 230MW Pen y Cymoedd wind farm in South Wales.
The firm is also investing in battery storage to balance its wind portfolio and to provide fast balancing services to National Grid in order to maintain system frequency.
As a UK energy supplier, Vattenfall may also pay customers for their flexibility, in order to minimise out of balance penalties, given its intermittent generation portfolio. Fellow state-owned company, Dong Energy, provides payments to customers on the same basis.
According to a UK spokesperson, Vattenfall will initially “not be seeking demand side response services from our customers. However this is one of the areas we will be keen to develop and we look forward to discussing with our customers how they can reduce their bills by being flexible”.
Of the October launch, Anna Borg, Vattenfall’s new head of business area markets, said: “Vattenfall is offering a new green power product to large UK electricity users. This is the first time that Vattenfall is making a B2B supply offering in the UK. We are able to do this because of our investment in British wind capacity since 2008. Our renewable electricity product will help our future business customers achieve their sustainability goals.”
The UK spokesperson said Vattenfall has no current plans to supply gas.
See details of the business electricity product here.
Related stories:
Vattenfall plans 22MW battery storage facility at south Wales wind farm
Dong: Be careful where you stick flexible megawatts
National Grid procures superfast grid balancing services
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