){kind=logo}
){kind=logo}
){kind=logo}
Flexing the Grid for a Decarbonised Energy System
🏠 | Blog | Flexing the Grid for a Decarbonised Energy System
Event: Reset Connect London 2026
Date: Tuesday 23 June 2026
Speakers: Sarah Honan, Head of Demand - ADE (moderator). Matt Ersin, Chair - Green Industrial Grids Association. John Swallow, Managing Director - TEST Consulting. Denise Owusu, Utility Decarbonisation Manager - Motive Power. Stephen Todd, Head of Growth - E2 Energy Partners.
Estimated read time: 9 minutes
Quick Read Summary
This was the most argumentative panel of the event, and the better for it. Five people who work on grid flexibility from opposite ends disagreed openly about whether flexibility is the answer to an intermittent renewable system or merely a way of buying time until the grid is rebuilt.
Underneath the disagreement was a shared diagnosis. Planning assumptions, connection queues and market design were all built around dispatchable generation, and none of them have caught up with a system where demand is the flexible part.
You will come away with a breakdown of where demand side flexibility savings actually come from, a contrarian case for data centres as the funders of grid investment rather than its enemy, and an honest account of why curtailment is both a scandal and a precondition.
Planning Assumptions Have Not Caught Up With Electrification
The panel opened on a shared problem in two different systems, and neither side of the Atlantic came out well.
Denise Owusu, Utility Decarbonisation Manager at Motive Power, described the American position. Utilities plan on 10 to 15 year cycles, electrification was visible years ago and was not acted on with any conviction, and demand from AI and data centres has arrived on top of it. She called the result a humbling experience, squeezing 10 years of planning into 18 months.
Matt Ersin, Chair of the Green Industrial Grids Association, put the European version in blunter terms. The grids were built for another age and are not up to the task, and the transformation underway is comparable in scale to the industrial revolution. His argument is that planning has been conducted from a generation-led perspective, and that demand needs a seat in it alongside a route to unlock private capital.
Sarah Honan of ADE, moderating, framed the whole session around that gap: demand side assets are still not treated as equal to generation and networks in policy, and the system was designed when nobody had to think about it.
The Hardest Part Is Persuading the Person Who Buys the Energy
Two panellists working directly with industrial sites made the case that the obstacle is neither technology nor policy but the customer.
Stephen Todd of E2 Energy Partners was the most direct. Convincing a facilities manager who has bought energy the same way for decades to run operations differently is a hard sell, whatever the economics eventually say. His conclusion was uncompromising: "the economics have got to work or it isn’t happening", because clean energy nobody buys achieves nothing.
John Swallow, Managing Director of TEST Consulting, described the same failure from the engineering side. His firm is typically brought in at the end of a process rather than the start, by which point a system has been designed that is electrically capable but poorly matched to what the client actually does, and the grid at the other end cannot absorb what comes back. "We’re at the end of the process," he said, which makes him the bearer of bad news rather than the source of a solution.
Both landed on visibility. Neither buyers nor engineers can optimise assets they cannot see, and the data to see them is scattered.
Data Centres May Be the Payers Rather Than the Problem
The most contrarian argument of the hour concerned the sector everyone else blames.
Todd pointed out that in the UK the transmission and distribution networks are paid for through charges levied on consumption, and that energy intensive industries are largely exempt from them. He cited a client using 35 gigawatt hours a year and contributing nothing to network costs. A data centre using considerably more will pay millions. "The person being pitched as the enemy is actually the superhero in this story," he said, arguing that this money is what will fund a distributed network at distribution level.
Swallow added that data centres are also the ones modelling their own consumption, running their own micro grids and proving what integrated control looks like.
Owusu pushed back. Large technology firms going behind the meter is not a success, in her view, but evidence that the system failed to plan for them. Ersin extended the objection to Europe, where a handful of companies can afford to build their own infrastructure and most cannot, which makes self-provision a poor template for everyone else.
Connections Reform Has Concentrated on Generation and Left Demand Behind
Honan asked whether two years of intensive work on the transmission connection queue has damaged the case for demand connections. The answer was unanimous.
Todd said yes without hesitation, and gave an example: an 8 megawatt site with a connection date at the end of March, pushed to September because a problem was not communicated between the transmission and distribution networks, leaving him explaining a delay to a client.
Swallow identified a structural cause at distribution level. Queues are full of applications that will never be built, because a private client failed to raise the capital or secure approval, and there is no mechanism to clear them out. That dead volume consumes headroom that genuinely available projects cannot access.
Ersin gave the European comparison, noting that his own charging business signs long motorway concessions and can wait more than a decade for a distribution connection. His warning was about political attention: the generation queue is a real problem, but a system that fixes only the thing currently in the headlines will find the same bottleneck waiting on the other side.
The Panel Openly Disagreed About What Flexibility Is For
The sharpest exchange came when Ersin declined the premise of the session. "Flexibility is not the solution," he said. It buys time and frees up capacity, but what the system needs is resilient, future-proofed grids.
Honan pushed back with numbers. Roughly a third of the savings case for demand side flexibility comes from avoided network reinforcement, another third from avoided generation capital expenditure, with further value from deferred reinforcement and from lower balancing costs as gas is pushed off the margin. Her wider argument was about what security of supply means. A system supplied by millions of distributed assets is harder to lose than one dependent on a single transmission line, a single large gas plant or a single interconnector.
Owusu supplied the operator’s hierarchy, and was candid that she does not like it. Reliability comes first, affordability second, and flexibility and decarbonisation after that. Honan’s closing objection was that this ordering rests on a false opposition, since a diversified system is a more secure one.
Curtailment Is Both a Scandal and a Precondition
The panel then found a subject where the investor and the campaigner swapped expected positions.
Todd defended curtailment on commercial grounds. An intermittent system has to be oversubscribed to cover the periods when it is not generating, and investors have to be paid for that. Until batteries become dramatically cheaper, the choice is to accept some curtailment or to build demand that can turn up when the power is there.
Honan’s objection was to who pays. Consumers currently fund the construction of renewable generation through one mechanism and then pay again to switch it off. She also drew an important distinction, since curtailment applies to generators rather than to businesses being told to stop operating.
Owusu and Ersin both argued the same principle from different markets: participation has to be voluntary and clearly rewarded rather than mandated, and one approach cannot fit every sector. A hospital cannot be asked to wait. Her example of what good looks like was a Scottish distillery that has decarbonised its heat supply by absorbing excess renewable generation.
Practical Application, How to Make an Industrial Site Flexible
This panel spoke mostly to industrial and commercial energy users, and its advice sits earlier in the process than most flexibility conversations.
Questions to ask
- Are our engineers involved at design stage, or are they inheriting a system somebody else specified?
- Do we know what our site actually consumes on a half-hourly basis, or only what the annual bill says?
- Are we exempt from network charges, and does that exemption shape how we think about grid investment?
Signals to watch
- Reform of distribution connection queues, particularly any mechanism for clearing dormant applications
- Flexibility products designed around dynamic half-hourly response rather than a fixed evening peak
- Demand connection timelines moving in step with generation connection reform, rather than lagging it
Traps to avoid
- Treating flexibility as a behavioural change programme when automation is doing most of the work
- Modelling capacity requirements on static demand assumptions that no longer hold
- Assuming a site can participate in flexibility markets before checking what its backup assets are permitted to do
What good looks like, on this panel’s account, is a site whose consumption is visible in real time, whose engineers were in the room at design stage, and whose flexibility earns money rather than costing goodwill.
Key Takeaways
Five specialists disagreed productively about whether flexibility is a solution or a stopgap, and agreed almost entirely about what is broken underneath it. The market, the queues and the models were built for a system that no longer exists.
- Around a third of the savings case for demand side flexibility comes from avoided network reinforcement, with a further third from avoided generation capital expenditure
- Utility planning cycles of 10 to 15 years are being compressed into months by electrification and data centre demand arriving together
- Distribution connection queues are congested partly with applications for projects that will never be built, with no mechanism to remove them
- Because network costs are recovered through consumption charges and energy intensive industries are largely exempt, data centres may fund more grid investment than the sectors criticising them
- Capacity requirements are still modelled on static demand, with flexible demand counted only as peak reduction rather than dynamic half-hourly response
Quote of the Session
"Stop planning flexibility. Start engineering it and proving it works."
John Swallow, Managing Director, TEST Consulting
Final Thoughts
Asked for one change that would make an intermittent renewable system work, the panel split along the same lines it had held all hour. Todd and Owusu both went to economics, wanting battery costs to fall far enough that industrial scale storage stacks up, and wanting flexibility to make commercial sense rather than moral sense. Swallow wanted less planning and more proving. Ersin wanted grids built faster and existing grids used more intelligently, including grid enhancing technologies.
What connects those answers is impatience with abstraction. This was a room full of people who install, finance and operate the equipment, and their frustration was directed less at policy ambition than at the gap between ambition and anything anyone can point to on a site. The most repeated word in the session was visibility, which is a modest ask and, on the evidence here, not a solved one.
Speakers
Sarah Honan, Head of Demand - ADE (moderator). Sarah has shaped ADE’s work on a more flexible, demand-led energy system since 2021, advocating for homes, businesses and industry to be properly rewarded for their role in decarbonising Great Britain.
Matt Ersin, Chair - Green Industrial Grids Association. Matt is Senior Director at Fastned and chairs GIGA, which brings together major industrial electricity users to advocate for faster grid expansion and smarter connection frameworks, with over 30 years of experience across European institutions and strategic advisory.
John Swallow, Managing Director - TEST Consulting. John brings over 30 years of experience across the electrical, communications, energy and building automation sectors, and leads the development of digital energy management solutions supporting businesses towards net zero.
Denise Owusu, Utility Decarbonisation Manager - Motive Power. Denise leads the National Public Utilities Council, the firm’s research and industry engagement arm, and began her career in oil and gas before moving into utility decarbonisation and advanced energy technologies.
Stephen Todd, Head of Growth - E2 Energy Partners.
Watch the Full Session