Households could help plug the gap to reach a cleaner power system
The UK has ambitious targets to deliver clean power by 2030. In partnership with Smart Energy GB, Anna Moss, Principal Consultant at Cornwall Insight, explores how consumer-led participation in electricity flexibility can help achieve these goals
By making small changes to how and when they use electricity, British households could play a decisive role in achieving the UK’s Clean Power 2030 target and help avoid more than £2bn in energy infrastructure costs.
Cornwall Insight’s new research, commissioned by Smart Energy GB, highlights that shifting household energy use away from peak times, or installing household green technologies like heat pumps, could help plug the UK’s ‘flexibility gap’ without need for further investment and time to build new generation assets.
While most of the system’s future flexibility needs are expected to be met by existing and planned technologies, including a ramp up of battery storage, we identified a critical 10 per cent ‘gap’ for other sources of flexibility still required in 2030. This gap could be met by a range of energy generation technologies, such as building around 400 new gas peaker plants. These would more than double current capacity, but would take years to build, cost up to £2bn and risk undermining progress towards a clean power system.
Alternatively, smart meter-enabled consumer-led flexibility could help close the gap. This involves consumers increasing, decreasing or shifting their electricity usage in response to a signal (like a message from their supplier or a change in price) to help manage the system. It could also include more significant shifts like using smart technologies such as electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps to ‘flex’ usage.
Our research suggests that widespread participation in smaller behavioural changes and the take-up of individual smart technologies could meet the requirements, with 19 million homes across Great Britain using a mix of heat pumps, electric vehicles or just shifting everyday usage.
Without these smaller behavioural changes, we’d need at least one million ‘fully smart homes’ responding automatically to signals from the grid to fill the gap. A fully smart home could have an electric vehicle with a smart charger, a heat pump, solar panels and battery storage installed, and be using these flexibly.
While it’s not highly realistic to assume that every household will be fully smart by 2030 or respond perfectly to every signal, our modelling demonstrated that the collective action of British households could match this.
With take up of smart tariffs (like smart meter-enabled electric vehicle or heat pump specific tariffs) accelerating rapidly, British households aren’t just passive energy consumers – they’re potential partners in our clean energy transition and can be rewarded for doing so. By shifting when they use electricity, households can help stabilise the grid, benefit from lower energy costs and save the country potentially billions in infrastructure funding.
The pathway we take will depend on how widely smart technologies are adopted in homes by 2030. There are important policy, product and consumer engagement questions around how to achieve this, but every household can play a role in reaching clean power goals, while cutting costs for themselves and the country. Consumer-led flexibility is a win on all fronts.
For more information about this research, please click here to download the report, Consumer-led engagement in electricity flexibility.
Want to learn more about consumer-led flexibility (CLF) and how households can take part? Smart Energy GB’s new interactive tool explains more about how households with smart meters can engage with CLF to support the energy system and be rewarded.
