While the mapping services we’re most well known for are FixMyStreet, MapIt, and the Local Intelligence Hub, we do occasionally get the opportunity to collaborate with other organisations that share our ethos and could benefit from our expertise building flexible, easy-to-use data maps, for their internal teams or external supporters to use. One such example is a project we’ve just wrapped up with the Social Investment Business (SIB).
SIB is one of the UK’s largest social investors, coordinating over £800m in loans and grants to over 6,000 charities and social enterprises since 2002. Two of their core priorities are strengthening community assets and unlocking energy resilience, which got them thinking: what if some of the organisations they’ve previously funded could participate in energy flexibility schemes, to not only contribute to a greener electricity grid, but make a financial return that could be reinvested into their communities?
mySociety has previously explored energy flexibility. But for those unfamiliar with it, the concept is simple: the companies that operate the UK’s electricity network offer to pay organisations if they’re able to “flex” their electricity use (using less—or sometimes more—electricity) over certain periods of time. Any organisation is free to bid for these “flex tenders”, but typically they’d need to have large energy-consuming assets like industrial refrigerators, data centres, or heated swimming pools, which they could turn on or off, to really provide the “flex capacity” the network operators require.
The thing is, with more community organisations adopting new technologies like solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and battery storage, the barrier for participation in these flex tenders has dropped. Now your local community centre, or church, or school might be able to take part. We’ve even seen community organisations act as aggregators, utilising not just the flexibility of their own electrical assets, but also those of nearby householders who are willing to take part.
SIB has a built-in network of such community organisations. But the challenge is finding the sweet spots – the right organisations with the right equipment to offer the required flex capacity in a given tender area. And that’s where mySociety’s developers came in.
Over the course of a few weeks we built a tool that helps SIB identify organisations in their network who might have flex capacity, and who are based in one of the thousands of flex tender areas coming up in the UK over the next few years. Our tool also allowed SIB’s analysts to overlay data on energy poverty and deprivation, on nearby data centres, and nearby Warm Welcome spaces.
As with any data-heavy project like this, most of the difficult work was in finding and collating all of the data to populate the map. There is no one source of all flex tenders in the UK, so we had to collect listings from the six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) individually. Some of these DNOs provided clean, structured data on the estimated geographical boundaries of each tender, while others provided only lists of postcodes, for which we then had to estimate rough boundaries, using the open data work of our much-loved former colleague Mark Longair. Add to this the complexity of each tender potentially having subtly different boundaries, or conversely, sharing identical boundaries, and we started to see why nobody had done this before.
But once the data was collected, and then mapped with some of the tips we’d learned through building the Local Intelligence Hub, SIB’s analysts were able to see exactly where their network overlaps with flex tender areas, and even identify the specific community organisations they could contact to explore the potential for participating in flex tenders.
More generally, the map also provides SIB with a persuasive policy tool – demonstrating the untapped potential for the UK’s third sector to support the country’s transition to a modern energy network, and the benefit that could be unlocked if this grassroots movement were to be supported by forward-thinking funding and regulation from central government.
Thomas Crabtree, Energy Analyst at SIB, said: “It’s been great to work with mySociety on this mapping project. Energy flexibility will play a big role in bringing cheaper, greener energy to the UK, and we want the community sector to lead this transition. This map represents an important first step in this work.”
We’re looking forward to seeing how our tool can contribute to the democratisation of the UK’s electricity network. In the meantime, if you have any similar projects you’d like to explore with us, just get in touch!
Photo: Kristian Buus / 10 10, CC BY 2.0, via Climate Visuals
