Great Britain opens Balancing Mechanism to residential battery storage under 1 MW
By Eve
System operator NESO has relaxed metering rules for units under 1 MW, allowing aggregated residential batteries, EV chargers and heat pumps to trade in the Balancing Mechanism market for the first time. The market runs continuous 30 minute auctions with thousands of daily trades, offering far more frequent revenue opportunities than the existing Demand Side Flexibility Service, which procured small volumes only a handful of times per month. Owners can participate via energy suppliers or third party aggregators.
Why it matters: The rule change creates a commercial pathway for aggregators and suppliers to monetise distributed assets at scale, potentially accelerating residential battery and smart charger deployments. Procurement teams should watch for new demand side response tenders as NESO scales balancing capacity from sub 1 MW fleets.