Keeping the Lights On: Driving Energy Flexibility for Decarbonisation 

Energy Flexibility: Balancing supply and demand

Energy flexibility is the ability to continually adjust and balance electricity supply and demand in real time. It’s a complex challenge involving energy generation, storage, transportation, delivery and consumption. 

Energy supply fluctuates according to fuel availability, trading conditions, transport, geopolitics and other factors, including weather conditions for renewable energy generation. Supply also needs to be resilient: interruptions can have a massive impact, as seen in the Heathrow outage and infrastructure issues in Portugal and Spain that both made international global headlines.  

The demand for energy fluctuates all the time. It could be for just seconds or a few minutes during ‘half-time kettle’ spikes; across days and weeks when the weather changes; or longer term, in response to evolving market needs, such as increasing electric vehicle (EV) adoption and the large power requirements to cool data centres.  

Energy Flexibility plays a critical role in decarbonisation

“To meet net zero, renewable generation capacity will need to increase. This will lead to greater variability in generation output, increasing the need for flexibility to manage the differences between generation and demand.” 
National Grid ESO, Introduction to energy system flexibility 

Meeting net zero targets relies on greater energy flexibility. With the shift away from predictable generation using fossil fuels, a more robust and resilient way is needed to respond in-the-moment to changes in supply and demand.  

How the consumers of energy will support future flexibility 

Residential, industrial and commercial consumers will play an increasing role in supporting energy flexibility. However small the individual activities, their aggregated actions can create significant impact.  

• Changes to the market, such as off-peak energy rates and incentives to reduce consumption, can be used to influence consumer behaviour. For example, encouraging consumers to switch usage to off-peak hours or to take advantage of low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps, EV chargers and storage heaters.  

• Using renewable sources such as solar panels, consumers can also become energy producers themselves, generating electricity for their own use, for sharing locally, for battery storage, or for selling to the grid.  

Changes in the way that consumers use, or supply, energy needs to be coordinated by bodies such as energy suppliers or aggregators. These bodies help manage energy through a portfolio of demand side response technologies and generation sources to deliver flexibility. This makes effective management of the large amounts of data involved increasingly important.  

The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, published by the UK Government in December 2024, identifies the key challenges to consumer-led flexibility, including a general lack of data sharing and visibility. Digital solutions play a crucial role in addressing these data challenges, enabling the energy system to become more flexible and resilient. 

What the Digitalising Energy Programme aims to achieve 

The current UK energy system is fragmented, complex and siloed. And for innovators, high investment costs, regulatory hurdles, and limited access to infrastructure and technology are major blockers to breaking into the market. 

Digital Catapult is helping to drive industrial decarbonisation through deep tech innovation. Partnering with Energy Systems Catapult, we are exploring the groundwork for a UK-wide initiative to accelerate a digitalised, flexible, net-zero energy system: through the Digitalising Energy Flexibility Programme. The project seeks to address how innovators can de-risk their entry into the UK energy sector and build on the ongoing investments in digital infrastructure, in addition to understanding how to attract more UK deep tech innovators to help solve flexibility challenges. 

By developing toolkits, support and resources, our initiative will help reduce uncertainty, foster collaboration, and build a thriving marketplace essential for achieving the UK’s decarbonisation goals.  Be the first to hear about upcoming decarbonisation activities and resources in the Digitalising Energy Flexibility programme now.