The Energy Transition’s Next Big Bottleneck EP 312
This week on Energy Unplugged, Richard Howard, Global Research Director at Aurora Energy Research, is joined by Sara Vaughan, Chair of Elexon. For years, the energy transition was largely a race to build renewables. Now, a different challenge is emerging: how do you run a power system increasingly shaped by millions of smaller, flexible assets? EVs, heat pumps, batteries and smart meters are creating enormous flexibility across the electricity system. Yet much of that potential remains difficult to see, value and coordinate. Without the right data and market rules, flexibility risks becoming a bottleneck rather than a solution. At the heart of the discussion is a bigger question about how Britain's future power system should work. Does the system operator need ever greater visibility and control, or can better price signals allow consumers, suppliers and distributed assets to do more of the work themselves? Britain already has much of the technology it needs. The next challenge is building a market capable of making millions of individual assets behave like one flexible system. Main topics include: Why the energy transition could eventually grind to a halt without more flexibility How half-hourly settlement could transform the role of consumers in the power market Does the system operator need to see everything, or can markets do more of the work? Could unlocking flexibility save billions in future system costs?
