Future of response services

 We are continuing to develop our response services based on industry feedback as well as our requirements for the services and long-term commitments and ambitions.  

In the short and medium term, we aim to cease procurement of dynamic FFR and develop a future service to recover frequency to +/- 0.5Hz within 60 seconds following large scale losses. We have been working through options to meet this need and a new service provisionally called Static Response has been identified.  

In the longer term we aim to manage a number of challenges highlighted in our Future Energy Scenarios (FES) 2022 report and Operability Strategy Report (OSR) 2023. More variable sources of generation, increasing volumes of demand flexibility and price driven coordinated behaviour of assets, such as EV’s and interconnectors, create more challenging balancing conditions for NESO.    

We are introducing an annual service development cycle for response, which if effective, will be implemented across ancillary service development.  

The ambition of the annual cycle is to provide all stakeholders with a repeatable, reliable plan which takes in to account fixed timelines for the formal Energy Balancing Regulation (EBR) consultation, and to provide sufficient timelines for engagement, onboarding and systems development. 

Thorough engagement activities will be held ahead of the consultation, ensuring all voices are heard, and importantly, the majority of changes are developed by NESO and communicated to industry for feedback, ahead of the consultation launch. This mitigates the challenge of making significant changes in the review period, post-consultation.