Smart Energy Flex
Reducing Costs Through Smarter Energy Use
Smart Energy Flex:
Reducing Costs Through Smarter Energy Use
Electricity networks are built with redundant capacity to handle peak demands—short, high-use periods like winter evenings when households and businesses rely on heating and lighting. However, higher investment is required to build excess capacity, sitting unused most of the time.
We’re introducing the Smart Energy Flex initiative, a way to manage peak demand more efficiently. By working with flexibility providers, Unison can offer opportunities for non-traditional network solutions.
Examples of Smart Energy Flex include:
- Encouraging industrial or commercial customers to shift their electricity use to off-peak times.
- Requesting large-scale customers to reduce [non-critical] load during peak demand.
- Reducing load by switching off smaller-scale controllable load across a wider range of customers (such as electric hot water cylinders for residential customers).
- Using stored energy, like batteries, to offset or support peak demand by injecting electricity into the network.
Smart Energy Flex aims to secure agreed flexible solutions that help cater for peak demands. This also opens up the potential for other situations such as reducing load demand during an outage (often Unison will use this for security so it will only be for the periods identified ONLY for outages)
About the Map:
This mapping tool has been developed to display the current and potential future flexibility needs across Unison’s network area. For each geographic area where a potential demand constraint has been identified, an availability window for flexibility services has been established. The map is updated annually to ensure accuracy and relevance, although Unison does not guarantee the completeness of the information.
We are seeking expressions of interest (EOI) from organisations interested in providing Smart Energy Flex. This includes retailers, aggregators, and large-scale customers who can help us manage peak demand in innovative ways.
- Solutions that provide enough flexibility to delay or reduce network investment.
- A range of approaches, including single solutions or a combination of multiple strategies.
- Fossil fuel-based solutions (e.g. diesel generators).
- Mass market solutions - though we’re open to controllable load solutions from retailers or aggregators.
- Proposals to sell us asset-based solutions for ownership and use on our network.
For any queries, further assistance or if you’re interested in partnering with us to deliver Smart Energy Flex, we’d love to hear from you by filling out the contact form below.