The M Shed, Bristol
Wednesday 11 March
View the slides from the day:
Beginners guide to flexibility
BWCE Flexible Community Energy
Cornwall Local Energy Market Overview
WPD Flexibility Innovation Project
Being smarter and more flexible with our energy use is key to tackling the climate emergency. As we head towards a decentralised and decarbonised energy future, we need local and community participation to gain customers’ trust and engage people with the changes and benefits of using energy in a smarter and more flexible way.
However, results from the first year of local flexibility markets show that they’ve been dominated by incumbent fossil fuel generators. To redress this balance and help community and local renewable energy organisations play a central role in our future energy system with smarter energy use, Regen and Western Power Distribution (WPD) hosted a series of free events, ‘Communities and the smart energy revolution’.
These events were an interactive forum for community energy groups, local authorities and local energy stakeholders to collaborate and learn from one another to help develop local energy projects. WPD experts were on hand to update them on the latest innovation projects and new flexibility markets, helping build partnerships that generate income for local organisations, using the network more efficiently to enable more renewable energy to connect.
Flexibility markets are an emerging value stream for energy generators and consumers, and attendees were able to find out how these services work, hear about new projects happening on the ground from the most advanced community and local energy groups, and learn how their communities can access new local electricity data which can open up the smart grid.
WPD are looking to roll out the ground-breaking OpenLV platform which makes local electricity data available to communities and businesses. Organisations interested in accessing this data were able to discuss the programme with WPD at these events.