21. August 2025
Flexibility today is mostly traded in large blocks at higher voltage levels – useful, but only the tip of the iceberg. With the rise of EVs, heat pumps and solar at the low voltage grid, the challenge and opportunity now lie in coordinating these resources locally. By combining NODES’ flexibility market with SMIGHT’s low voltage grid monitoring, points of congestion can be identified and resolved through local flexibility – a practical solution that is already possible today
Currently much of the flexibility that is traded on flexibility platforms is quite ‘high level’ i.e. it is large ‘blocks’ of energy at the higher voltage levels over large blocks of time and well in advance. E.g. I need 50MWh every weekday evening between 16h and 20h from anything hanging off this primary substation for the months of October to March. There is nothing wrong with this per se, as it serves a certain requirement. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what could be possible. A large part of the energy transition involves the electrification of cars and domestic heating along with decentralised energy production in the form of roof-top solar all of which is connected to the grid at the low voltage level. These technologies present the distribution grid with both a major challenge but also a solution. The challenge is the high degree of variability and dynamism, for example you can have times of the day with extremely high energy production whilst at the same time having some of the lowest consumption – sunny weekend when everyone is out and about, then this can also flip to the other extreme with no production and extremely high load – dark cold weekday evening with heat pumps running and EVs charging at home. Then there are many variations of this in between and on different time scales.
I said that these technologies were also the solution. They are the solution because they are also controllable – an EV doesn’t have to charge at full speed right now most of the time, a heat pump doesn’t have to run at full power all the time, and the solar power being generated could be stored for later use or even turned down if we don’t need it. The missing piece of the puzzle is one of coordination and communication. Currently, a solar panel doesn’t ‘know’ what the demand is on the grid, nor does it know which storage resources are available on its part of the network, nor does it have any ability to communicate to them. Likewise, the grid operator doesn’t ‘know’ that your EV battery has 60KWh of energy storage that it can ‘lend’ you over the next 12 hour period.
What we need to create is a system/environment/protocol which enables the stakeholders on the LV networks to communicate with one another and in turn adjust their behaviour in response to network and market conditions. There is a perfect future scenario where all resources on the LV networks can seamlessly communicate with one another and be coordinated to an optimal utilisation.
This isn’t possible quite yet, but we can take the first steps towards this. We believe the first steps are to establish where we already need this kind of local load balancing – we already know it won’t be everywhere, and indeed it is only actually in a small number of points in the grid. That already brings down the size of the task to something much more manageable. Once we know where we have issues now that we need to solve, we need to create a communication platform so that the supply and demand actors have a means of communicating with one another.
Another name for such a platform is a market, and indeed there are already marketplaces, and they are called flexibility markets. Also, it is possible to find out where in the low voltage grid there are already points of high load this is done using Low Voltage Grid Monitoring. NODES and SMIGHT want to bring these two worlds together. NODES offers a flexibility market platform and SMIGHT offers a low voltage grid monitoring solution. When you put the two together, you have a solution which can identify points of congestion and then resolve these through flexibility. This is not a futuristic dream, it is a reality today.
