Image courtesy NESO
The UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) has partnered with Tapestry, an energy moonshot that’s part of Alphabet’s innovation lab, to enhance dispatch optimisation.
The project is one of several under NESO’s Volta programme, under which NESO has been partnering on innovation projects to integrate AI for enhanced control room decision making and operational efficiency.
Under the Grand Optimiser, NESO is partnering with Tapestry, and energy moonshot at Alphabet’s X, The Moonshot Factory.
The project aims to enhance dispatch optimisation, increasing the efficiency of control room instructions that are given to electricity generators such as gas and nuclear power stations, wind farms and batteries.
By using integrated digital models, the Grand Optimiser project aims to streamline processes and potentially reduce the costs associated with operating GB’s electricity system.
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The project will create a full optimisation framework says NESO, rather than just a single optimiser, which will define how multiple digital models interact, co-simulate and align across operational timelines.
According to NESO in a release, the project will span the end-to-end design optimisation process for the balancing mechanism, with a series of deliverables that will be foundational to the control room transformation, including:
- End-to-end design of balancing optimisation: To define the overarching architecture of how multiple solvers—covering energy, reserve, and ancillary services—will interact, to set the stage for co-simulation, sequential optimisation and integration timelines.
- Architecture plan and whole system design: A comprehensive system architecture plan detailing how the Grand Optimiser will be embedded within NESO’s operational ecosystem, including data flows, solver orchestration and control interfaces.
- Roadmap for development and integration phases: To outline the phased development and integration strategy for the Grand Optimiser, including milestones, dependencies and alignment with NESO’s broader Volta programme.
- Interface and product design mock-up: A visual and functional mock-up of the Grand Optimiser’s interface, showing how it will integrate with NESO’s existing systems and user workflows.
Volta is one of several projects included in NESO first Whole Systems Innovation Strategy, which lists digitalisation, demand-side flexibility (DSF), unlocking systems capacity, customer energy efficiency, whole systems integration, and system security and resilience as key priorities.
Other partnerships under the Volta programme include with Mesh AI (Adaptive Models Feasibility project), AFRY (Qualitative Benchmarking and Impact Analysis project), Faculty AI (Advanced Scheduling Adviser project), University of Oxford and IBM (Real Time Predictor Innovation project) and Smith Institute (Verification and Validation project).
The wider Volta programme’s AI-driven insights, says NESO, are expected to significantly improve operational reliability and stability, optimise dispatch, and reduce balancing costs.
