Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) has launched a new initiative, 'Demand Diversification', to explore innovative ways of managing peak electricity demand in the north of Scotland.

The project involves real-world trials and simulations to assess the potential of demand-side response mechanisms. By incentivising customers to shift their electricity consumption to off-peak times, SSEN aims to reduce the need for costly network upgrades and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future.

The trials will focus on two key approaches:

• Allocated Capacity: FSPs will be assigned a specific capacity and paid to manage the demand of their customers within this allocation.

• Dynamic Congestion Response: FSPs will receive real-time network data and be incentivised to schedule loads to periods of lower demand.

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By implementing these solutions, SSEN hopes to optimise network utilisation, improve grid stability, and ultimately benefit consumers through reduced costs and faster connection times.

Kevin Stewart, Projects Manager in SSEN Distribution's Future Networks team, said: "Electricity demand is going to grow exponentially, as more people stop using polluting fossil fuels, and instead move over to low-carbon technologies. A massive advantage of technologies such as heat pumps, EVs, and electric storage heaters is that topping them up is schedulable – in other words, they can be charged at a time separate to when they're needed.

"In our trial, we're going to lean into this schedulable aspect of these technologies, to explore how we can use innovative approaches and new services to schedule electricity use over a much wider period.

"It's paramount we manage the network in a safe, reliable, and enduring way. This trial will offer further insights into how this can be done; it'll also provide us with an indication of the extent to which we'll be able to use these flexible approaches to meet growing electricity demand without always having to resort to building new networks in the first instance."

To explain more about the aims of its trial, the expectations on participating FSPs and customers, and the procurement process to becoming a trial participant, SSEN Distribution's Kevin Stewart will be hosting a webinar at 11am on Tuesday 10 December.