How does it work?

Demand side response or demand side flexibility is where businesses are financially incentivised to reduce or increase their energy use to provide flexibility to National Grid or DNOs as and when they need it. 

Watch: What is DSR and how it can benefit your business:

When a business takes part in demand side response, typical processes that they modulate to deliver DSR include air conditioning, greenhouse lighting, electric heating, refrigeration, pumping, combined heat and power, and energy storage. These are processes and assets whose consumption can be adjusted for short periods with no impact on day-to-day business operations. As well as filling in for shortfalls or rapid spikes in national demand, businesses taking part in demand side response can also be incentivised to use excess green energy from the grid, for example on a windy day.

Flexitricity helps you establish how much flexibility your site is able to offer, which services are the best fit, and how much you can earn. We then aggregate your site with other assets in our virtual power plant to allow participation (sites can also participate without aggregation, provide they have the required capacity—normally over 1MW). Flexitricity manages the onboarding process, strategy and 24/7 operations and dispatch for your assets. 

You can kick-start this process by calling us on 0131 221 8100.

Our team is with you every step of the way:

At the outset, we spend time learning about your sites, assets and operations from your own staff. We recommend you contact us during the planning stage of the project if you’re developing a new site or installing a new asset.

At this stage we will:

• Discuss your requirements and operational parameters;
• Conduct an in-person site survey if required; and
• Prepare a revenue illustration.

We operate a revenue share model and don’t charge upfront / fixed fees. A revenue share model can significantly reduce your risk and ensures that your DSR provider has a strong incentive to maximise revenue for you.

How much will I earn?

We get asked this all the time and the answer is—it depends. Each site is different and we need to look at a range of parameters when preparing revenue illustrations. That’s why we don’t generalise and make statements about how much each service is worth. Flexitricity's approach is always grounded in reality—we only promise what can be delivered.

Some of the key parameters we look at:

• Asset type(s) and response times;
• Asset size and flexible capacity;
• Geographic location / DNO area;
• Risk appetite; and
• The asset’s ‘day job’ (if applicable).

Our team works hand in hand with you during engineering, commissioning and testing through to go-live.

• Our engineering team assesses the site and determines whether any upgrades are required to get the site ready for participation.
• We organise the installation of our outstation that allows us to connect the site to our control room or set up the connection via an API.
• Our engineering, IT and operations teams run all the required tests and ensure that the site is ready to go live.

We discuss and agree with you the best operational strategy for your site. This will result in early choices between wholesale market trading and Balancing Mechanism opportunities and balancing services such as frequency response. In addition, all qualifying capacity will be entered into the Capacity Market.

Our operations team and trading desk monitor your site and the energy markets 24/7 and adjust the strategy as needed to maximise revenue for your sites. Balancing services tender cycles are getting shorter and “run when the system needs it” markets like the Balancing Mechanism are becoming more important. That means ensuring that you are agile enough to move between the different markets as the values shift is already becoming critical. This is going to become even more important in the future.

We help you keep up to date with the latest market developments and ensure you’re aware of any new opportunities. Our account managers are industry experts and participate in a wide range of industry working groups. They also liaise closely with all of our internal teams to ensure our customer not only receive the best possible service but are first in line to gain access to new revenue streams. 

If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and chat to our friendly team. We are always happy to talk about what we do.

Watch: How to get started with DSR