What questions can pGrid help answer?
In the complex electricity world that is evolving and as society transitions to net zero, pGrid can help answer the following questions: -
- In the strategy that you are pursuing, do the lights stay on? - pGrid will show you whether the scenario you are investigating is stable, in other words will the lights stay on? This is done by considering the plant margin at any point in time and by looking at what actions the Electricity System Operator can take to balance the system using storage assets and Demand Side Response (DSR).
- If we have data from Electricity System Operators (globally) on prices and volumes of generators, can you show me how they work in detail? (Can you map it/colour it in?) - Yes, pGrid takes these complex data sets (for example, a half hourly demand data set has 17,500 records and the UK list of major generators is over 1300 gensets) and presents the data in a simple digestible form. The data is downloadable into Excel etc so you can make your own side calculations or prepare more specific reports.
- What is the value of assets in these systems? - pGrid has calculated the running hours for each genset and the system marginal price for each half hour and so can calculate capture prices for each genset. These are added to the genset cost assumptions to produce a genset profitability.
- What happens when Hinkley Point C, [or potentially D, E, F] is added to the system? - pGrid is ideally suited to looking quickly and accurately at ‘what ifs’ like ‘What if Hinkley Point comes online next year?’
- What does demand look like in the future? - Demand will change dramatically as more electric vehicles come into the system and more homes are transferred away from natural gas. pGrid builds a half hourly picture of demand for all the various services that villagers need in the ‘Village 100’. Village 100 is a notional concept built into pGrid which says, ‘if your demand was a village of 100 occupants (villagers) what would it look like?’ pGrid applies a multiplier to take the notional village to a regional or national level.
- How do EV’s effect load in the village and the system? - Each villager can have an electric vehicle added (or removed) and that electric vehicle has an EV charger at home. For each villager, an assumption is made as to how many miles the villager drives and how often the vehicle uses roadside charging (i.e., not the home charger).
- How do I ‘Get to Know My Grid’? - The above points are a short list of pGrid functions. In effect the totality of pGrid’s 50 reports provide a comprehensive review of any grid system and as such allows you to ‘Get to know your grid’.
