Industry-wide changes to the electricity market

Glossary

The electricity industry is always evolving and occasionally there are major changes that impact every aspect of how companies interact with the market. This page highlights these industry-wide changes and will enable companies to understand when and how the changes will become operational.

Energy Price Guarantee scheme administration

Elexon is the Scheme Administrator for the Energy Price Guarantee covering domestic electricity consumers in Great Britain. As the Scheme Administrator Elexon will manage the estimation of domestic consumption and associated payment arrangements to and from Suppliers that take part in the scheme.

The Energy Price Guarantee is expected to operate for 2 years, from 1 October 2022.

Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement (MHHS)

In 2017, energy regulator Ofgem announced a review on whether the whole electricity market (commercial as well as residential properties) should move to half-hourly Settlement.

Moving to MHHS will:

  • make the Settlement process more accurate and quicker reducing current timescales to around 4 months
  • act as an enabler for new products and services, for example supporting use of electric vehicles or making use of smart appliances through ‘time of use’ tariffs (where consumers save money if they shift their energy usage away from times of peak demand)
  • help to encourage innovation to support a smarter and more flexible electricity system

The Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement (MHHS) programme will be one of the biggest overhauls of electricity systems and processes since privatisation and the introduction of the competitive market in 1998.

Retail Energy Code

As part of its Retail Code Consolidation and Switching Programme Significant Code Reviews, Ofgem is intending to merge a number of existing Industry codes into the Retail Energy Code, which includes some aspects of the BSC. These changes will also require existing BSC documents to be updated where references to obsolete codes will need to be updated.

About TERRE

Project TERRE (Trans European Replacement Reserve Exchange) is a European project to implement a new Replacement Reserve (RR) balancing product, which has been developed by a group of European Transmission System Operators (TSOs), including the GB TSO as National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO).

Modification P344: Project TERRE seeks to remove all BSC barriers to customers and independent aggregators participating directly in the existing Balancing Mechanism (BM).

BSC changes by role

There are pages that list all of the industry roles that have been identified as being impacted by BSC Change Modifications and Change Proposals. Please note that the assessment of where impacts may affect certain roles within the electricity market may be amended during the course of the Change process.

My BSC

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