P483: Pushing Boundaries

P415 revolutionised the UK wholesale market, allowing independent aggregators such as Axle to trade flexibility on behalf of consumers. Since completing the first trade under P415 on Dec 23rd 2024, we’ve worked hard with the market operator (Elexon) to scale participation and maximise the benefits of flexibility to consumers and the grid.

As soon as P415 was approved, we realised that the rules as drafted had some quirks. Although the intent of P415 was to empower consumers & independent aggregators to provide flexibility to the system at the lowest possible cost, it left in place some unintended barriers. Specifically, it limited eligibility to meters that were Half Hourly Settled (HHS), even if participation in the market was via the asset. This meant that a household with an EV charger that was accurate enough to participate in P415 was still dependent upon their supplier to buy and sell energy on their behalf in a half-hourly fashion. This was a major barrier - most UK meters are not HHS, and it's not transparent to consumers that this is the case. This will persist until the the completion of Market Wide HHS in mid 2027.

In discussion with Elexon and Ofgem, it swiftly became clear that nobody (outside of certain large suppliers…) thought this was desirable. With the help of lots of other motivated and energetic parties, we pushed through mod P483, which allows asset-metered participation in P415 for households which are not half-hourly settled. This unshackled consumers from a back-office decision made by their energy suppliers over which they had no visibility and no influence.

P483 went live today, and we participated for the first time with assets behind non half-hourly settled meters (CoP-11 qualified EV chargers). This represents the culmination of an intense year of policy, implementation, and engineering effort that highlighted the strengths of Britain’s energy system; an unusual willingness to innovate, iterate, and improve upon the status quo in pursuit of a cheaper, greener grid.

We’re proud to have played our part.

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