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Ofgem’s latest CATO consultation closes Friday 22nd July Friday 22nd July is the last chance to submit responses to Ofgem’s most recent consultation on Competitively Appointed Transmission Owners. The consultation document was written with specialist input and advice from TNEI. Ofgem is proposing that transmission assets which have a capital cost greater than £100m (high value), which are completely new, and which are separable could be designed, built, owned and operated by third parties. These third parties will be determined via a competitive tender and will be known as CATOs ““ Competitively Appointed Transmission Owners. Ofgem has been developing the Competition in Onshore Transmission arrangements for several years, but time is running out if you want to comment on the most recent proposals. Their latest consultation “‘Extending competition in electricity transmission: criteria, pre-tender and conflict mitigation arrangements’, which was published in May, will close today (Friday 22nd July). TNEI has

One second or less. This is the response time required from providers of the new Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) service. National Grid aims for EFR to improve on the existing 10 second response time (Primary and High response) and 30 second response time (Secondary response) for Firm Frequency Response (FFR). EFR will help to address the security of supply challenges faced by National Grid in a rapidly changing electricity system. Changes in the system frequency are caused by variations between supply and demand. Historically, inertia (which resists movement of frequency) has been provided mainly by synchronous thermal plants ““ the big spinning masses within these generators would oppose changes in frequency. However, as these plants are slowly being replaced by asynchronous technologies (renewable generators like wind and interconnectors), there could be a fall in inertia and therefore more changes in frequency. Battery storage potentially has a huge role to play

In the last week, Ofgem and National Grid have both published consultation documents that could potentially have enormous revenue implications for generators connected to distribution networks. These documents both concern “’embedded benefits’. National Grid’s consultation can be found on their website. Read Ofgem’s open letter here. “‘Embedded benefits’ typically describes the costs avoided when generators connect to the distribution networks rather than the transmission network. There is no single definition, but it typically relates to Transmission Network Use of System charges (TNUoS), Balancing Service Use of System Charge (BSUoS) and costs of losses. This includes costs avoided by the generators themselves, as well as costs which are reduced for local suppliers. The TNUoS demand charge is the biggest component of the embedded benefit. By entering into contracts with suppliers, embedded generators can help suppliers to reduce or avoid TNUoS demand charges by generating electricity during three “triad periods” each year.

The results of the Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) Tender were released on 26th August. This was the first procurement round for a new, faster service to manage the grid frequency (see our introductorypost).The results are big news, because energy storage providers have topped the list, and these contracts will lead to the first major commercial deployments for grid-scale battery storage in Great Britain. Who are the winners? National Grid procured a full 201MW, split between seven energy storage providers. This was the maximum volume that National Grid required in this round, and their procurement of this total proves that battery storage is now competitive with traditional methods of managing frequency. Other technologies, such as flexible generation and demand aggregation, also participated in the auction, but none were able to compete with energy storage. The winning tenders were: EDF Energy ““ 49MW Vattenfall Wind Power ““ 22MW Low Carbon ““ 10MW