NODES IntraFlex UK Trial (WPD-NGED, 2019-2021)

Reference: A cluster of web sources documenting IntraFlex, a UK flexibility-market innovation trial run by Western Power Distribution (WPD; the DNO for the Midlands, South West England, and South Wales, ~7.8 million customers — since acquired by National Grid and renamed National Grid Electricity Distribution, NGED) using the NODES platform, together with current-state research (2025–2026) on which platforms UK DNOs actually use today. Web-researched to follow up an open data gap flagged from Source - NODES API Swagger Specification (2026) — whether NODES’ ENA Open Networks PQQ integration reflects a real UK deployment.

Raw sources: three primary items are now archived verbatim in Raw/Clippings/ — the 14 Nov 2019 launch press release (NODES - Western Power Distribution Launches IntraFlex.md), the 22 Oct 2020 Phase 1 results press release (NODES - Flexibility Project Reaches Successful Milestone IntraFlex.md), and the 14 Feb 2022 commercial-launch/Phase 2 results report (The Energyst - Western Power Debuts First-Of-A-Kind Flex Marketplace For Smaller Assets.md, fetched via Wayback Machine as theenergyst.com blocks direct fetching). Other supporting claims (current UK DNO platform landscape) remain web-researched, not locally archived — see URLs inline below: UK Power Networks and National Grid press materials; trade press (SolarPowerPortal, Enlit World, Electron, Piclo, SmartCitiesWorld, Edie).

Summary — the answer is yes: a real trial that went commercial, then appears superseded

NODES did operate a real, named, dated UK flexibility market: IntraFlex, a Network Innovation Allowance-funded trial launched 14 November 2019 by WPD in partnership with NODES and Smart Grid Consultancy. It used NODES’ ShortFlex market to let flexibility providers bid close to real time — WPD signalled its flexibility needs seven days ahead of use, with a stated aim of moving toward real-time procurement (the specific claim that products were structured as 30-minute blocks biddable down to 90 minutes ahead of delivery could not be confirmed against the primary press materials found and should be treated as unverified).

Phase 1 results (reported 22 October 2020): >50 MW of flexibility procured across 241 trades over a two-month trial window (NODESmarket press release). WPD’s Matt Watson confirmed a Phase 2, planned for spring 2021, to scale volumes and refine platform processes toward broader rollout.

Phase 2 completed, and IntraFlex went commercial on 14 February 2022 (theenergyst.com, Alban Thurston) — closing the open question of whether Phase 2 ever finished. Phase 2 recorded 1,198 trades and 774 MWh of flexibility purchased (vs. Phase 1’s 241 trades and, per this same article, 50.51 MWh purchased at an average price of £386/MWh — note this MWh figure is the energy volume reported by theenergyst.com in 2022, distinct from the “>50 MW” procured capacity figure NODESmarket itself reported in 2020; both are given here as each source states them, without reconciling the units). Market-based pricing delivered up to 4% savings on the cost of flexibility through price competition. The trial ran with seven storage-asset owners across both phases (including Kaluza, ev.energy, and Welsh Power); going commercial in Feb 2022 opened the platform to a wider set of smaller assets (EV chargers, home batteries) competing against diesel generators on price.

This is the real-world referent behind the EnaAssetPqq/EnaCommonParameters/FlexibleDispatch schemas found in the 2026 swagger spec: IntraFlex-era integration work building NODES’s platform to the ENA Open Networks standard (the cross-DNO flexibility pre-qualification template).

However, no evidence was found of NODES continuing as an active UK production platform past the IntraFlex commercial launch (i.e., nothing describing IntraFlex’s operation, wind-down, or a formal end date after Feb 2022 was found), and current (2025–2026) research on UK DNO flexibility platforms points elsewhere entirely:

UKPN separately ran a NODES demonstration (17 December 2021) showing ease of market setup using UKPN’s Open Data Portal — but this was explicitly a setup demo, not a live trading market, and UKPN’s actual production platform (Localflex/EPEX SPOT) is a different vendor entirely.

Reading: NODES appears to have been an early, credible UK entrant — IntraFlex predates most of the current UK DNO flexibility-platform landscape by several years, produced real traded volumes across two completed phases, and reached a genuine commercial go-live in February 2022 (not just a trial). But the major UK DNOs whose platform choices could be traced (NGED, UKPN, SPEN, SSEN) have all since settled on other vendors (Localflex/EPEX SPOT, Piclo, Electron/ElectronConnect) for their current live markets, implying IntraFlex was itself superseded at some point between 2022 and today — though no source found states when or why. The ENA-standard schemas surviving in NODES’s 2026 API are most plausibly legacy from the IntraFlex-era integration rather than evidence of an ongoing UK deployment — though this cannot be fully ruled out without a direct statement from NODES or a UK DNO about current platform status.

Relevance to wiki

Data gaps

• Direct confirmation (from NODES or a UK DNO) of whether NODES has any current UK contract, pilot, or standby integration — the platform landscape survey above is inferred from which vendors DNOs publicly announce, not from a statement that NODES has fully exited the UK