Scottish households could help 'plug the gap' to reach a cleaner power system

By making small changes to how and when they use electricity, Scottish households could play a decisive role in achieving the UK’s Clean Power 2030 target, being rewarded for shifting their usage while helping avoid more than £2 billion in energy infrastructure costs. 

New research by Cornwall Insight, commissioned by Smart Energy GB, highlights that shifting household energy use away from peak times or installing green technologies like heat pumps could help plug the UK’s “flexibility gap” – the difference in the system’s ability to balance supply and demand as more intermittent renewable power comes online – without the need for further investment and time to build new generation assets. 

While most of the system’s future flexibility needs are expected to be met by existing and planned technologies, including a ramp up of battery storage, we identified a critical 10% gap for other sources of flexibility still required in 2030. This gap could be met by a range of energy generation technologies, such as building around 400 new gas peaker plants. These plants would more than double current capacity, but would take years to build, cost up to £2bn and risk undermining progress towards a clean power system. 

Alternatively, smart meter-enabled consumer-led flexibility could help close the gap. This involves consumers increasing, decreasing, or shifting their electricity usage in response to a signal (like a message from their supplier or a change in price) to help manage the system. Consumers are rewarded by their energy supplier for doing so, as well as helping reduce overall energy costs and carbon emissions by maximising the use of intermittent renewables. 

There are several ways in which consumer-led flexibility could help, from small behavioural changes (like moving everyday consumption to off-peak times), to significant shifts like using smart technologies flexibly, such as electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps. 

Our modelling suggested that widespread participation in smaller behavioural changes and the take-up of individual smart technologies could meet the requirements, with 19 million homes across Great Britain using a mix of heat pumps, electric vehicles or just shifting everyday usage. 

Without these smaller behavioural changes, we’d need at least one million ‘fully smart homes’ responding automatically to signals from the grid to fill the gap. A fully smart home could have an electric vehicle with a smart charger, a heat pump, solar panels and battery storage installed, and be using these flexibly.

While it’s not highly realistic to assume that every household will be ‘fully smart’ by 2030 or respond perfectly to every signal, our modelling demonstrated that the collective action of households could match this. 

With take up of smart tariffs (like smart-enabled electric vehicle or heat pump specific tariffs) accelerating rapidly, Scottish households aren’t just passive energy consumers – they’re potential partners in our clean energy transition, and can be rewarded for being part of it. By shifting when they use electricity, households can help stabilise the grid, benefit from lower energy costs and potentially help save billions in infrastructure funding. 

The pathway we take will depend on how widely smart technologies are adopted in homes by 2030. There are important policy, product and consumer engagement questions around how to achieve this, but every household could play a role in reaching our clean power goals, be rewarded for shifting their usage and help bring down infrastructure costs across the system. Consumer flexibility is a win on all fronts.

Want to learn more about consumer-led flexibility (CLF) and how households can take part? Smart Energy GB’s new interactive tool explains more about how households with smart meters can engage with CLF to support the energy system and be rewarded.

This article is sponsored by Smart Energy GB. 

www.smartenergygb.org