
What’s the timeline for this stage of CrowdFlex?
The Alpha phase kicked off in August 2022 and will complete in February 2023. Applications for funding for the Beta phase open in March and the programme starts in Summer 2023.
What is the Centre’s specific role in CrowdFlex?
CrowdFlex’s discovery phase completed in early 2022. It is currently in Alpha phase. During this phase, Centre for Net Zero is:
Undertaking a literature review into previous domestic flexibility trials, understanding the customer attributes that most influence flexibility
Feeding into the principles around customer communications for the trial
Delivering the trials design for Crowdflex, including how the trials will run, what we will vary, and any required resources. We are additionally feeding in key learnings from our detailed analysis of the Big Dirty Turn Down
Delivering the ‘modelling’ work package, which specifies how we would want the statistical model to forecast and predict flexibility for a given event and outlines a technical implementation roadmap and resource plan.
As we design the future energy system, CrowdFlex is seeking to answer some of the most pressing questions about its design, such as:
Testing the ability of automated low carbon technologies to participate in grid services.
Assessing whether we can intelligently run ‘turn up’ and ‘turn down’ events at key grid boundaries to avoid constraints.
Seeing if we can alter the demand flexibility service so that it becomes a first resort, rather than a last resort.