UK Centrica to Cut CO2 in Tokyo

Centrica has joined forces with Japan’s largest power company, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) to deliver industrial demand response capacity for the Japanese grid, the UK utility said March 29.

From April 1, Tepco will use Centrica Business Solutions’ award-winning FlexPond Demand Side Response (DSR) platform to provide the transmission system operator with flexibility services for the reserve market in the Kyushu region. It has a "significant number of both industrial customers and renewable energy projects connected to the power grid," Centrica said.

Centrica’s proprietary platform allows users to build their own virtual power plants (VPPs) and deliver clean demand side response capacity in less than a second from a variety of flexible generation and demand assets. The cloud-based platform is used by over 150 of Europe’s largest energy users. 

VPPs allow physical assets such as renewable generators and energy storage facilities to be managed as a single unit, providing an alternative to centralised power generation. Centrica said that VPPs mitigate the need to build new fossil-fuelled plants and giving other energy and utility companies access to its software is an important way to support global decarbonisation efforts. 

Tepco plans to expand its offer beyond Kyushu to provide transmission system operators all over Japan with flexibility services from commercial and industrial customers. Tepco CEO Shinji Akatsuka said he looked forward to contributing to the realisation of a low carbon society.

Tepco and Chubu, which have formed the world's biggest LNG buyer Jera, are integrating their power generation assets under one roof next month.