SMS plc, has been awarded a new contract through the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero as part of a consortium aiming to establish new ways of achieving domestic flexibility.
Funded by the Government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio, the project – which sees SMS partner with Engage Consulting Limited and Nederlands Meet Institute (NMi) – will deliver laboratory testing schemes for Interoperable Demand Side Response (IDSR) applications.
This includes behind-the-meter Energy Smart Appliances (ESAs) such as electric vehicle chargers, batteries, white goods, and heating systems.
Mark Hamilton, Managing Director of FlexiGrid at SMS, said:
To accommodate this shift to a distributed renewable energy system, flexibility will be required from many different sources, but will increasingly need to come from domestic behind-the-meter ESAs like EV chargers, heat pumps, storage heating, and battery storage. However, this will require new levels of control and standards to be introduced to allow assets to be aggregated and operated as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), and this is ultimately what we hope to achieve through this new programme.
As part of the project, SMS will develop a new version of its FlexiGrid aggregation platform to test ESAs against new IDSR applications.
Tom Woolley, Smart Product and Strategy Director at SMS, said:
This is a significant step forward that combines SMS’s technical and testing prowess in the smart meter industry with our pioneering FlexiGrid aggregation services. Working together, these two areas of expertise will play a significant role in enabling the move to a smart, flexible, and low-carbon energy system.
