Ofgem moves to free up grid capacity by tackling excess battery projects
Vivetti Energy was pleased to participate in Ofgem’s recent consultation and supports its proposal which represents an important step towards enabling a more innovative, flexible and decentralised electricity market.
BY TIMOTHY LYONS
As an industry innovator, Vivetti Energy supports the evolution from a system based on passive consumption to one which recognises the value of distributed generation, storage and flexible demand. Regulation should increasingly encourage specialist business models that deliver value through intelligent coordination of energy assets rather than through scale alone.
With roughly 90GW of batteries operating or queued against a Clean Power 2030 need of around 29GW by 2035, something had to give. If approved, projects will now pay £3,000 per MW to hold their place, rising to £25,000 per MW while the queue stays oversubscribed.
For projects that make it through, a harder-won connection makes each connected MW a scarcer asset. Meanwhile, more batteries chasing the same revenues will compress returns, as the IEA is already seeing in ancillary services.
So, the investment question moves from access to yield. How much value can you extract from capacity you've already secured, across wholesale, balancing, ancillary services, capacity and constraints, and by running generation, storage and demand together?
Two identical batteries on identical connections aren't worth the same if one is operated more efficiently than the other, both day to day and over a 15-20 year life, where today's dispatch decisions are reflected in tomorrow's degradation.
The game is changing and Vivetti is betting that operating capability will quickly begin to impact how these assets are valued, and ultimately who ends up owning them.
Vivetti Energy’s AI-driven Omni-One™ software optimises electricity demand, generation and storage across distributed energy systems. Our goal is to become the operating platform of choice for suppliers, communities, asset owners, and enabling system operators to maximise flexibility, affordability, resilience and decarbonisation through intelligent optimisation.