Senior Analyst - Smart Grids

Role:  Senior Analyst – Smart Grids

Location: Gloucestershire (flexible working available)

Salary: £60,000 - £75,000 + Pension

The company

My client is one of the most recognised developers of renewable energy & storage projects within the UK, having developed over 2GW of power within the Solar PV and Onshore wind markets alone.

Their growth plan is aligned to the development of future technologies to support the UK’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2023.

About The Role

Reporting to the Technical Delivery Manager, this role will play a lead part in helping maximise the profitability of Smart Grid (SG) managed assets, through oversight and development of the algorithms deployed within our automated trading platform. This in house developed platform (aka Virtual Power Plant or VPP) controls action on those assets, according to their individual flexibility potential and the revenue opportunities presented across multiple markets for flexibility and trading.

The role will necessitate a thorough understanding of the dynamics of both short-term energy trading markets and alternative revenue streams available through grid services, Frequency Response, or Balancing Reserve. Hence recognising how and where these streams can be combined to target an optimal portfolio of trades that is tailored to each of the SG managed assets and implementing pricing and auction bidding strategies in order to successfully acquire the desired target portfolio at minimum cost.

Working alongside the senior data scientist and other team members, the post holder will need to be sufficiently confident to direct material improvements to the environment as well as providing input into the platform future development – especially with regards to managing evolving profitability trends and the potential from future trading market growth.

The Smart Grids Team are responsible for the development of an asset flexibility platform, whether that is the optimisation of energy storage revenues, aligning Power Purchase Agreements for flexible renewable generation or load shifting for our business and domestic customers so as to avoid costs – and maybe help our trading portfolio of renewable assets at the same time.

Core Responsibilities

• Senior role in helping develop a ‘best in class’ optimisation model for controllable flexible assets (Batteries, Solar, Wind, against available income streams.
• Work with Data Analysis team on developing state of the art auction theory to bid assets into the day ahead various markets, mindful of stacking constraints caused by mutually exclusive revenue streams.

About You

• Have an innate curiosity, a tendency to be discerning and a natural interest in the space.
• Are comfortable communicating (verbal and written) to different audiences (e.g. technical and non-technical)
• Ability to manage and understand trading positions.
• Ability to provide actionable insight from complex data.
• Strong analytical, theoretical and numeric skills
• Experience in the Energy Industry.
• Python user or similar
• Degree in a numerate subject, or a proven track record of quantitative and qualitative analytical abilities, ideally in a commercial setting

Desirable additional skills and experience

• Experience programming and developing optimisation techniques.
• Experience of modelling distributed energy resources such as energy storage
• Experience using SQL is advantageous
• Experience using AWS or other cloud services
• Strong initiative and the ability to take the lead on projects.
• Experience using REST APIs to read and post data.
• Ability to mentor/coach more junior team members