Project LEO and TRANSITION have announced that successful completion of live trial of flexibility trading on a new unique Neutral Market Facilitator platform that has been designed and developed by TRANSITION working with Opus One Solutions.

The team is now seeking new participants for further trials. A transparent market for flexibility services will be fundamental to facilitate the UK's transition to net zero.

The UK has committed to decarbonising its power system by 2035 and distribution network operators (DNOs) will be key enablers of this change. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) Distribution will adopt Distribution System Operations (DSO) in the future and through its innovation projects, is developing new systems to deploy flexibility.

Flexibility is the ability to shift the timing and location of consumption and generation of electricity to support the network. A flexible energy system is expected to reduce the costs of our electricity system by £10bn per year by 2050 and could create 24,000 jobs, but to achieve that a fair and transparent market for flexibility must be developed.

Project LEO is SSEN's flagship innovation project and is working to model a local energy system for the future. Running concurrently with LEO, the TRANSITION project was created to demonstrate the functionality of DSO architecture. It has created the Neutral Market Facilitator platform which was developed by Opus One Solutions from GE Digital, to enable a transparent marketplace that can provide access for all flexibility providers to trade flexibility services.

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The platform is unique because it links to other technologies that have been created by the project team, including the Whole System Coordinator, Power System Analysis and Forecasting tools. As well as enabling the end-to-end process of trading flexibility services between the DSO and flexibility providers, it will also facilitate peer-to-peer import and export capacity trading, maintaining the visibility of peer-to-peer trading activity on the network.

Following the successful testing of the Neutral Market Facilitator in the current trial period, which runs until February 2022, the second and third trial periods will incorporate new functions and test different flexibility services including peer-to-peer capacity trading. TRANSITION and Project LEO teams also intend to test the platform with a wide range of assets and users so are keen to hear from any organisations in Oxfordshire, including aggregators, that may be able to provide flexibility services.

Brian Wann, TRANSITION Project Manager for SSEN said: "We are delighted that the first trials of our Neutral Market Facilitator platform have been successful and I would encourage interested parties with energy assets that could be used to provide flexibility services, to get in touch with the team and find out about our future trials. The more participation we have in the trials the more we will learn.

"The UK Government has set the ambitious target of a decarbonised electricity system by 2035 which, coupled with the increasing take-up of low carbon technologies such as electric vehicles and heat pumps, will contribute to a doubling of electricity demand by the same date. Use of flexibility trading through a Neutral Market Facilitator will be crucial to support delivery of these targets in a cost-effective manner."

Joshua Wong, CEO of Opus One Solutions said: "Flexibility markets coordinated with smart energy networks, demonstrated in the TRANSITION project, will play a significant role in decarbonising the energy system. We are proud to support TRANSITION in developing the Neutral Market Facilitator platform, which provides key components to support the scaling and business case for flexibility service providers. Along with SSEN, we believe supporting flexibility as Business as Usual will be a key component of SSEN's adoption of DSO functions. We look forward to continuing to work with SSEN and using the key learnings from these trials to build better and scalable future solutions for a smarter, flexible and resilient energy system."

Project LEO is funded by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. TRANSITION is funded by Ofgem's Network Innovation Competition.