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DSBR: Does P272 Still Offer Access To Demand Response Schemes?

160,000 business sites will be transferred to half hourly billing and settlement by April 2017 under P272. This does have an impact on energy costs: for the first time, many organisations will find themselves exposed to higher distribution and transmission network charges when using energy during periods of peak demand. Businesses will also need to pay for meter operator (MOP) and data aggregator or collector (DA/DC) services.

However, there are also significant benefits that P272 offers, not least the ability to monitor and analyse your half hourly data to review your usage profile and peak demand usage, enabling you to identify a plethora of savings.

Half hourly meters also unlock access to demand response schemes. National Grid has created a number of initiatives to use business flexibility to help keep the system balanced at peak demand. Organisations are called on to turn down consumption or switch to on-site generation where available with varying notice periods and receive payments for doing so.

What’s changed?

In August, National Grid made a surprise announcement that it was withdrawing its Demand Side Balancing Reserve (DSBR) scheme for the coming winter. DSBR is a temporary initiative to help keep the Grid balanced before the Capacity Market kicks in from 2017. Last winter, businesses provided around 130MW of power as part of the scheme, either by contracting directly with National Grid or by joining an aggregator service such as Limejump to benefit from demand response without any penalties for non-participation.

However, this move doesn’t mean that demand response has been deprioritised. National Grid has reaffirmed its commitment to make business flexibility a key component of its future balancing plans, expecting businesses to provide almost 6GW of balancing services within the next 10 years (that’s 1.5 Hinkley Point power plants!) The Association of Decentralised Energy predict that business flexibility could save £2.35billlion by 2035, balancing intermittent renewable supply and negating some of the need for new large scale power plants.

There are still a large range of schemes that businesses can participate in through National Grid’s Power Responsive programme, from frequency response to bidding in to the capacity market in 2016.

Key to identifying the right scheme for your organisation is understanding your energy data to identify opportunities to shift load away from peak demand periods and manage your demand more proactively. Intelligent demand management will also help you to avoid high network charges.

P272 can unlock all this for you, opening up potential revenue schemes that can help to offset rising energy costs or further challenges to the bottom line.

To speak to an expert about how to use P272 to unlock benefits for your business, get in touch today.

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