News & insights

We have been pleased to support Elexon with an impact assessment of BSC Modification P379 which was published by Elexon at the end of March 2021. Elexon appointed CEPA for this project given our experience in complex economic appraisals and impact assessments, and our knowledge and understanding of energy policy and regulation.

P379 was designed to allow all customers, including households, to have multiple electricity suppliers at a single meter point. Implementation of the proposed modification would have constituted major industry change with important costs, benefits and distributional impacts for consumers.

Our impact assessment helped Elexon and stakeholders to understand and navigate these anticipated costs and benefits and ultimately informed the decision of the proposer to withdraw the modification.

Supporters of P379 saw it as an enabler of the kind of consumer-led innovation that can help deliver Net Zero. In our impact assessment, we considered a range of possible benefits including:

• take up of electric vehicles (EVs);
• Heat as a Service (HaaS);
• community energy; and
• peer to peer trading.

Our analysis identified some potential for benefit in relation to EVs and HaaS in particular. However, we did not establish sufficient confidence in the magnitude of these benefits to counteract more immediate and certain costs of implementation.

We also identified a risk that the time and attention necessary to implement P379 would crowd out more urgent developments needed to deliver Net Zero.

While our findings support the decision to withdraw the modification at the current time, we highlighted that several industry developments could impact on the costs and benefits case. We recommended that learnings from the development of P379 be retained and meter splitting potentially revisited in around five years once the market has sufficiently developed.