Flex Markets Unlocked Innovation Programme: Phase 1 SBRI

The Department is funding the following feasibility studies in Phase 1, where each project will develop robust technical specifications for proposed technical solutions.

Yottar Balance Owner: Yottar Project costs:  £197,159.09 Location: Devon

Project summary: Yottar Balance will seek to make it easier for electric vehicle, heat pump and other small energy asset owners to make money with these assets by improving their ability to offer flexible energy services into the electricity system. In doing so, the project will be supporting the ability of these assets to balance increasing amounts of variable renewable energy, and help to minimise the need for expensive electricity network upgrades. The project will do this by improving asset data transparency, enabling easier market access and improving coordination between electricity markets.

e-gate Owner: EPEX SPOT SE Partner: Gridimp Ltd Project costs:  £185,246.37 Location: London

Project summary: Consortium partners EPEX SPOT SE and GridImp will specify and develop an end-to-end solution for flexibility service providers (FSPs), from technology to market. This project will contribute to simplifying the market entry process, reduce operational complexity and ease revenue stacking.

Focusing on the market access of small FSPs, the consortium will look to bridge the gap between energy management, aggregation solutions and market platforms to bring those assets to market. Furthermore, the consortium aims to remove technical and financial barriers to markets and develop a simplified bidding workflow, to demonstrate how flexibility can gain value from wholesale, local and national (ancillary services) markets.

The outcomes will be increased information transparency, facilitated market access and coordination, within a trusted governance of an exchange.

Protocols to support future of flexibility Owner: Arup (Ove Arup & Partners Ltd) Partners: Energy Systems Catapult, and Chaddenwych Services Ltd (t/a Electron) Project costs:  £199,930.43 Location: London

Project summary: Arup, in partnership with Energy Systems Catapult and Electron, will carry out a feasibility study that aims to define a set of open protocols for data standardisation across the whole flexibility buyers and sellers users' journey, which will be complemented by a trust framework to ensure transparency and trusted governance. These measures will pave the way for seamless integrations between buyers and sellers across multiple markets, products, and platforms, preventing vendor lock-ins and siloed operations while consolidating existing Flexibility Market developments. This will help realise the flexibility benefits that exist from distributed energy resources (DERs) and low carbon technologies (LCTs) to reduce system costs while also enabling and encouraging commercial interoperability.