Electron, National Grid are pushing 'portable data' for UK flexibility markets

London-based power market software company Electron has teamed up with National Grid to boost interoperability in the UK’s flexibility markets, the companies announced earlier this month.

Electron will integrate its flexibility platform ElectronConnect to National Grid’s Market Gateway platform, described as a “self-serve web portal” for customers to connect their assets that is directly integrated with real-time network data. Service providers registered on Electron’s marketplace will essentially face a lower barrier to entry in National Grid’s electricity distribution network.

• The top line: The partnership exemplifies a wider push toward interoperability between flexibility market platforms in the United Kingdom. That push is beginning to result in standardizing the experience for asset-owning electricity customers across the country, and boosting participation in flexibility programs.
• The market grounding: In 2021, National Grid acquired the U.K.’s largest electricity distributor, Western Power Distribution, for more than $9 billion (7.6 billion pounds) and rebranded it to National Grid Electricity Distribution. The Market Gateway platform represents National Grid’s approach to flexibility markets — rather than buying into a full service package offered by Electron or its competitors, National Grid operates its own program.
• The current take: The next phase in scaling the U.K.’s flexibility markets will involve reducing friction for flexibility services providers to offer their services in multiple markets, said Electron CEO and co-founder Jo-Jo Hubbard. “Flexibility is only valuable to network utilities when there’s a lot of volume, because they can defer network upgrades. But until it’s really valuable, it’s hard to drive volume,” Hubbard said, adding that the company’s work with National Grid aims to “increase the volume and value piece for network utilities and service providers alike, to nudge that virtuous circle into existence.”

National Grid DSO launched Market Gateway in 2023, and today has more than 70,000 flexibility assets registered on the platform. In the last year, the utility said, it has deferred more than $99 million (80 million pounds) in network upgrades, thanks in part to the more than 17 gigawatt-hours of flexibility services it procured via the platform.

Electron is already working with three of the six distribution utilities in the U.K., though most utility customers sign up for Electron’s platform directly. By the end of this year, Hubbard told Latitude Media, Electron expects to have a majority share of the country’s market.

The integration with Market Gateway is a major step for Electron in terms of commercializing the platform, Hubbard said. 

“The Gateway piece is very much part of our vision of how these interactions between different market platforms and utilities have to work at scale,” she said. “We’ve done a lot of work to build a marketplace that can handle thousands of different energy assets interacting with millions of different price signals.”

But the next key step is “data portability,” she said, which is the ease with which a flexibility service provider who has registered and qualified to offer assets in one region can “port” that data across to another market.