Electricity Retail Market-wide Half-hourly Settlement: Draft Impact Assessment Consultation

Consultation
  • Upcoming
  • Open
  • Closed (awaiting decision)
  • Closed (with decision)

Publication date

Closing date

Industry sector

Supply and Retail Market

Decision

We are consulting on issues relating to the introduction of market-wide half-hourly settlement (MHHS) across the electricity retail market.

MHHS will place the right incentives on retailers to develop and offer new tariffs and innovations that encourage and enable more flexible use of energy, for example, time of use tariffs, automation, vehicle to grid solutions and battery storage.

Accompanying the consultation document is a draft impact assessment (IA) of the introduction of MHHS. The IA sets out the potential impact of Ofgem’s preferred option for implementation, as well as the other options we have considered. We have also published a separate paper on the consumer impact of MHHS.

Please note, the analysis that underpins the IA and consultation document was carried out before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in GB. We will take account of the impacts of the developing public health situation on the project as we move forward. We are seeking views as part of the consultation on what impact stakeholders think the pandemic will have on the project timescales.

We originally published the draft IA and consultation document on 30th April. We said at the time that, due to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, we were publishing the documents for transparency and were not at that point setting a deadline for responses. We said when we did set a deadline we would provide at least 10 weeks notice.

This consultation is now open for just over 12 weeks, and will close 14/09/2020. During this time we plan to host two virtual stakeholder workshops (one mid-late July, and one early Sept) to further discuss the consultation, and allow stakeholders the opportunity to seek any necessary clarifications. Both the draft IA and consultation document include tables to show where any material changes have been made. Once the consultation is closed, we will consider all responses carefully. We will publish any non-confidential responses alongside a decision on next steps on our website. If you would like any part of your response to be considered confidential, please let us know in your response alongside an explanation of why. Please clearly mark the parts of your response that you consider to be confidential, and if possible, place the confidential material in separate appendices to your response. Responses should be sent to the team at halfhourlysettlement@ofgem.gov.uk no later than 5pm, Monday 14 September 2020.

In the meantime should you have any questions, please get in touch via the Half-Hourly Settlement team mailbox: halfhourlysettlement@ofgem.gov.uk.

We have now published the non-confidential responses we received. A confidential response was received from Utiligroup; we are noting the fact here with their consent