In response to Dom’s excellent analysis of the carbon saving potential of community smart grids, I wanted to add something on the business case side that the project seeks to explore. Many of our members have investing in technology (such as deep retrofit, renewable generation or Electric Vehicles) despite cost implications rather than because of them, we can clearly see a marked increase in uptake across the sector as costs are reduced.
While we want to explore how this technology is useful for the prosumer in terms of reducing carbon emissions, we are also interested in what benefits it is able to offer in terms of grid balancing (benefiting the District Network Operator) and in using renewable energy whenever it is available (benefiting energy producers). If we are able to adjust our energy usage to fit the needs of the wider network and energy production, is there a monetary value in this and if so at what scale does it need to be.
From the point of view of a DNO they provide a complex network of assets – primary substations feeding