Energy Security and Net Zero Committee

“[Speaker: Rachel Fletcher] Again, to be fair to the Government, they have clean flex targets in the Clean Power 2030 plan. They have appointed, I would say, a very effective commissioner for flexibility. We have a very detailed—I don’t know how many lines on a Gantt chart—road map, a lot of activity, not a lot to show for it just yet. I think the message is beginning to hit home and the Clean Power mission team, for example, is increasingly talking about the importance of flexibility in this transition programme. Just to give you a sense of how far away we are from using this valuable asset, our estimate is that there is about 13 GW of flexibility from domestic consumers alone. That is people with EVs typically. You could easily double that or more if you brought businesses into the equation. By 2030, if our adoption of EVs grows the way we are seeing it, that could be a 32 GW prize. Yet at the moment in the balancing market, which is where the system operator resolves constraints, they are using 30 MW of consumer flex. Half of that, by the way, comes from industrial consumers. They are using 15 MW out of a 13 GW potential. The potential here is massive and a number of us are saying it is just not getting the attention that it deserves.”