Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what steps her Department plan to take in response to the key themes set out in the discussion paper published by Ofgem in September 2015.

The Department is taking steps in a number of areas that respond to the key themes set out in Ofgem’s paper on ‘Non-traditional business models’. This includes:

• Working closely with Ofgem, looking at removing barriers that are holding back smart energy solutions, including demand side response and storage. We plan to issue a call for evidence on smart energy in due course followed by a Government response, which will outline the future direction of the work. Further information can be found in the document ‘Towards a Smart Energy System’:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/486362/Towards_a_smart_energy_system.pdf.

• Allocating at least £50m for innovation in energy storage, demand-side response and other smart technologies over the next five years to help promising new technologies and business models access the market.

In addition, we are supportive of the work by Ofgem to:

• Review the regulatory regime for local energy to ensure consumer benefits are realised;
• Consult shortly on providing innovation spaces for experimentation, giving more regulatory certainty for innovative approaches within the existing regulatory framework.

• Consult on the future of the £100m Network Innovation Competition to better enable network innovation by non-licenced companies from 2017, to maximise the delivery of genuinely innovative projects and technologies.