Vision
The organising idea: what problem this architecture is trying to solve and how it expects the electricity system to work.
Vision
The Great Britain architecture is fundamentally an evolutionary, layered market design.
The core idea is to retain a national wholesale market for commercial energy trading and add specialised mechanisms wherever the underlying electricity system creates requirements that the wholesale price does not directly solve.
Those additional layers include:
- the Balancing Mechanism;
- transmission constraint management;
- ancillary services;
- the Capacity Market;
- Contracts for Difference;
- regulated transmission and distribution charging;
- local flexibility procurement.
The architecture therefore does not attempt to collapse all electricity-system requirements into one mechanism. It coordinates the system through a portfolio of markets, contracts, regulated charges and system-operator interventions.
The central design question is whether this layered architecture can continue to evolve efficiently as the system becomes more decentralised, renewable, electrified and digitally controllable.