It’s Triad season
Welcome to November and the start of the Triad season. Time to watch out for alerts and manage your electricity generation and consumption to suit.
A quick recap
National Grid charges each Distribution Network Operator (DNO) for their use of the transmission network according to the amount of power it was drawing during the 3 periods of highest consumption - the Triads.
Your DNO passes that charge on to you on the same basis - you pay according to your average grid import across the three Triads. You might see it on your bill as ‘Transmission Charge’ or ‘Transmission Network Use of System’ (TNUoS). Reducing your consumption during the Triads will reduce your transmission charge.
What’s it worth? The charge varies substantially across the country, from £27 per kW at the top of Scotland to £63 per kW in Cornwall. If you’d usually be using 500kW of electricity, in much of the country you’d expect to pay about £25,000 per year in TNUoS. If you manage to halve your consumption during the Triads you’d save yourself £12,500.
Benefit for generators
It used to be the case that TNUoS was a big win for many electricity generators, one of a suite of ‘embedded benefits’, paying a similar amount for exported electricity to the charge on import. This is no longer the case - Triad benefits for generators have reduced significantly over the last few years.
Generators north of the midlands will receive no TNUoS payment for the 2022/23 season. Values increase as you move further south with the largest payment of £9.23/kW being awarded in Cornwall.
3 years ago export of 1MW during the Triads might have netted you £50k; now it’s somewhere between nothing and £9,000.
When will the Triads be?
Triad season runs from 1st November to the end of February. We don’t know in advance when they will happen, but given that they are the periods when consumption of electricity across the grid is at its highest, they tend to be between 5PM and 7PM on weekday evenings.
Unfortunately (but logically) we don’t know in advance when a Triad will happen. Energy suppliers often issue warnings based on anticipated demand so it’s worth asking your electricity supplier to add you to the appropriate mailing list.
Do the Triads still matter to generators?
Yes. Regardless of whether you’re going to receive a TNUoS payment, when demand is high electricity prices tend to follow, so you’ll want to be exporting as much and using as little electricity as you can. Given that Triads tend to coincide with DUoS red band, you’re probably already in the habit of maximising export, but these are strange times so it’s probably still worth keeping an eye on Triad warnings in case something unusual happens.
If you’d like any guidance on Triads and their implications please get in touch.
