LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review 0 Report Title: Plug-in Projects- Year 1 Review Author(s): Barbara Hammond & Adriano Figueiredo Organisation(s): Low Carbon Hub Version: 1.5 Date: 14/01/21 Workpack*: WP3 Deliverable: D3.6.1 Reviewed by: Adriano Figueiredo Date: 13/01/21 Signed off by: Dr Barbara Hammond MBE, CEO Date: 14/01/21 0 LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review Context The UK Government has legislated to reduce its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Meeting this target will require significant decarbonisation and an increased demand upon the electricity network. Traditionally an increase in demand on the network would require network reinforcement. However, technology and the ability to balance demand on the system at different periods provides opportunities for new markets to be created, and new demand to be accommodated through a smarter, secure and more flexible network. The future energy market offers the opportunity to create a decentralised energy system, supporting local renewable energy sources, and new markets that everyone can benefit from through providing flexibility services. To accommodate this change, Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) are changing to become Distribution System Operators (DSOs). Project Local Energy Oxfordshire (LEO) is an important step in understanding how new markets can work and improving customer engagement. Project LEO is part funded via the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) who set up a fund in 2018 of £102.5m for UK industry and research to develop systems that can support the global move to renewable energy called: Prospering From the Energy Revolution (PFER). Project LEO is one of the most ambitious, wide-ranging, innovative, and holistic smart grid trials ever conducted in the UK. LEO will improve our understanding of how opportunities can be maximised and unlocked from the transition to a smarter, flexible electricity system and how households, businesses and communities can realise the benefits. The increase in small-scale renewables and low-carbon technologies is creating opportunities for consumers to generate and sell electricity, store electricity using batteries, and even for electric vehicles (EVs) to alleviate demand on the electricity system. To ensure the benefits of this are realised, Distribution Network Operators (DNO) like Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) are becoming Distribution System Operators (DSO). Project LEO seeks to create the conditions that replicate the electricity system of the future to better understand these relationships and grow an evidence base that can inform how we manage the transition to a smarter electricity system. It will inform how DSOs function in the future, show how markets can be unlocked and supported, create new investment models for community engagement, and support the development of a skilled community positioned to thrive and benefit from a smarter, responsive and flexible electricity network. Project LEO brings together an exceptional group of stakeholders as Partners to deliver a common goal of creating a sustainable local energy system. This partnership represents the entire energy value chain in a compact and focused consortium and is further enhanced through global leading energy systems research brought by the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University consolidating multiple data sources and analysis tools to deliver a model for future local energy system mapping across all energy vectors. 1 LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary 3 1.1 Range of projects 3 1.2 Viability 3 1.3 Policy and regulation 4 2 Report Purpose 6 3 Year 1 Pipeline: Project Status 6 4 Technical Factors 8 4.1 MVS Programme 8 5 Commercial factors 11 5.1 Oversolar extensions 12 5.2 Oversolar newbuild 14 5.3 Evolution of the third-party investment case for rooftop PV 15 5.4 Hydro optimisation 22 5.5 Community microgrids / CESCO (Community Energy Services Company) 24 6 Conclusions 24 7 Appendices 31 A: Pre-existing LCH assets brought into Project LEO 31 B: Y1 projects installed 32 C: Project pipeline 32 2 LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review 1 Executive Summary During year 1 of Project LEO, the Low Carbon Hub (LCH) has worked with its 43 existing projects and 17 new projects to form a pipeline of ‘Plug-in Projects’ (PiP) for Project LEO. This pipeline would: 1. Provide the range of Plug-in Projects required to complete fully automated flexibility service market1 trials by the end of Project LEO; 2. Test the technical, commercial and social viability of the Plug-in project exemplars in current market conditions; 3. Inform policy and regulatory processes currently on-going, eg RIIO-2 and RIIO-ED22, to ensure that they support the development of a mass market of flexible assets (generation, storage and demand-side reduction) at the grid edge. 1.1 Range of projects The development of assets as initially planned has been hindered by unexpected events since the project plan was first submitted. The most severe of these have been: 1. The uncertainties caused by the outcome of Ofgem’s Targeted Charging Review (TCR) 2. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic 3. Uncertainty over the value and availability of new long-term revenues after the end of the Feed-in Tariff that, in itself, makes the investment case for small-scale assets very challenging. Despite these challenges, LCH has continued the development of Plug-in Projects by taking on higher risks, beyond the value of the iUK grant funding available to it through Project LEO. LCH has been able to do this because its business model produces community benefit funds that can be used to provide essentially free money as match to the grant funding. In this way, LCH has maintained the range of Plug-in Projects required to develop and test the technical aspects of delivering the five flexibility services 3. The constraint lies in the numbers of projects of each type LCH is able to fund in this way. 1.2 Viability In terms of technical viability, the LCH portfolio of existing and new projects has already provided the foundation for the development of a comprehensive programme of Minimum Viable System (MVS) trials. These projects are located in priority geographic areas defined by primary substation 1 Flexibility services refer to a subset of the wider energy market and are either procured or facilitated by the Distribution System Operator (DSO). 2 RIIO-ED2 is part of the overall RIIO-2 price control process. The overall RIIO-2 process covers electricity distribution as well as electricity transmission, gas distribution and ESO controls. 3 The five flexibility services identified are: Sustain Peak Management, Secure or Dynamic Constraint Management (Pre- or Post-Fault), Secure Short-Term Operating Reserve, Exceeding MIC/MEC and Offsetting. 3 LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review boundaries where full trials of new flexibility services will take place, including full integration of assets to end-to-end automated markets. The pipeline is also generating valuable learnings about how to enable flexibility at low voltage levels of the electricity network, the grid edge. It is clear from this work that there are more technical issues to solve than were anticipated, and that these issues are about communication protocols and data management as much as about hardware, but there is confidence that these issues can be solved. The picture on commercial viability is less positive, however. It is clear from work on the year 1 projects that the current market structure, particularly the lack of long-term visibility of new revenue streams, favours exceptional projects where there is a very favourable combination of factors in play, such as: 1. Large scale 2. High percentage of behind-the-meter use of on-site generation 3. The availability of long-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) 4. Low-cost, and timely, availability of grid connections, and 5. Revenue streams that have the minimum of exposure to policy changes, such as the TCR. It is almost impossible to stack up new small-scale assets for the provision of flexibility services at the grid edge. Given the projected market penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) over the coming decade, this situation will need to change if capacity at the grid edge is to be able to accommodate this major shift. Given these realities, it is likely that the provision of flexibility services will initially just provide an upside to the financial models of existing generation and storage assets, and will not incentivise the development of new demand reduction projects. The MVS trials have not yet addressed issues of social viability. A range of nine Smart and Fair Neighbourhood projects (SFNs) has been developed forming years 2 and 3 of the project pipeline that will allow us to gain understanding about the desirability of the services being trialled and the extent to which it is possible to develop social acceptance around them, creating an enabling environment for fast uptake where co-benefits are clear and available. 1.3 Policy and regulation Small-scale assets at the edge of the network are currently not financially viable and in order to make them so, and to enable capturing the value potential in the overall energy system, some aspects must addressed, such as: 1. High transaction costs are present throughout the regulated energy sector which will require streamlined processes and widely adopted simple and standard contractual frameworks to reduce 4 LEO Year 1 Plug-in Projects Review 2. The simple adaptation of current ESO/DNO model for the contracting and procurement of flexibility services also has very high built-in transaction costs making it impossible for small- scale assets to participate in the market; a solution must be found in dealing with those transaction costs too 3.