A Smart Grid for all

In the past year, UK Power Networks has invested heavily into the skills, resources, and competencies of the workforce to enable effective and impactful data analytics.

At UK Power Networks DNO, the Data Analytics Team sits within the IT department. This team is responsible for seeking out and trialling high value opportunities within the business, developing solutions including automation, AI, insight generation and web apps. The Analytics Team works across all areas of the business and has bought value to customer services, finance, network operations, asset management and others. Over the past year, some of the top outcomes from this team include:

• Conducted the UK’s first disaggregated Smart meter data trial to develop an algorithm which predicts secondary substation utilisation to >80% accuracy.
• Developed insights which helped take UKPN to No. 1 for Customer Services
• Created and inspections and maintenance efficiency app.
  The team is also award winning and has won awards from the “National Technology Awards” body and the “British Data Awards”.

Alongside this, the dedicated DSO dedicated Data Science and Software Development Team, made up of 6 data scientists, developers, data engineers, and machine learning operatives are tasked with building software that benefits our internal teams and ultimately the customer. A critical success of the software development team is the design, development, and implementation of operational short-term forecasting of network assets, such as transformers, circuits, generators, and demand. The short-term forecasting sees a real time data service that updates every 30-minutes, looking forward in time 7 days, with half-hour granularity. We forecast any of the 120,000 plus transformers to understand the short-term impacts of generation and demand.

For our existing staff, we launched a Digital Academy in 2022/23, which offers up to 400 spaces over a 5-year period for any employee to obtain entry-level to degree-level education on critical competencies for the role. We are looking to our future as a DSO, so new roles that the Digital Academy will support include digital strategists, data analysts, cyber security, and software engineering.

Every year, we published our an update on the Digitalisation Strategy and Action Plan (DSAP) which reports our progress against core activities. The key initiatives include intelligent automation for workflow and process efficiency, cloud migration of physical equipment for scalability and resilience, AI enablement to boost proactivity, geospatial analytics for improved insights, open data for maximising stakeholder participation, smart meter data ingestion to boost our data analytics, among many others.

A strong example of the benefits of DSAP include the Intelligent Automation project, which deploy bots to automate manual processes within UK Power Networks to improve efficiency and accuracy. Key goals include automating intensive workflows, increasing productivity, enhancing customer experience, and improving data quality. Stakeholder engagement includes walkthroughs, deeper dives into processes, and collaborative workshops to design customised solutions.

In the UK, smart meters belong to the private customer and roll out of smart meters cannot be influenced by networks such as UK Power Networks. Additionally, accessing and leveraging that data requires strict legal and regulatory oversight. To work around this and explore the untapped potential, UK Power Networks petitioned the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to allow research access to disaggregated smart meter data on a strictly monitored trial basis.

Last year, we obtained access to 162,535 disaggregated consumer datasets from DESNZ, being the only network in the UK granted access to such granular data access. The trial lasted for 12 months and resulted in several different research outcomes. One such outcome is that we recognised the need for more detailed consumer profiles beyond the two standard industry profiles currently used, resulting in the development of 26 consumer personas that accounted for the impact of Low Carbon Technologies (LCTs).

Following our successful trial of using disaggregated smart meter data in the UK last year, we have seen tangible evidence of improvement to network visibility. Utilising smart meter data, combined with monitoring devices and analytics, we have attained full visibility of the low voltage (LV) network. Our predictive data science model, informed by monitoring only 14% of secondary substations (covering 30% of households), forecasts utilisation across the entire LV network. This insight guides our investment decisions.

Alongside this, we are increasingly opening our network asset data, providing full access and the ability for third party stakeholders and customers to access, use and consume our data. We shared aggregated smart meter data on our open data portal, as well as the smart meter powered, machine learning driven LV utilisation estimate of all our secondary transformers.

The proliferation of smart meters onto our network has unlocked new technological advancements and automations on our network. All connected smart meters are integrated into our network infrastructure in such a way that we have the capability to interact with every installed smart meter. As a result, we can manage our call volumes more effectively, particularly during storm periods when our call volumes increase dramatically from the typical 700 a day. It is not uncommon that the caller reports a loss of service on an area of the network we are unaware of any faults, during our triage process, having the capability to ‘ping’ a smart meter, whereby we send and receive a signal from the smart meter has been a game changer.

Now, every operator has the capability to ping the caller’s smart meter which can instantly inform us whether there has been a loss of service at the residence or business. In cases where the service is operational, we can quickly move to restoration steps, such as checking the residential circuit board for trips, which typically results in rapid restoration of power. This saves considerable resources on our engineering teams from investigating misreported faults, and results in the best possible outcome for the calling customer, who has their power restored immediately. In 2023, This enabled UK Power Networks to retain Ofgem’s ranked no. 1 in broad measure of customer satisfaction score with 94%, our highest ever score. Additionally, the UK’s Institute of Customer Service ranked us best customer service provider of any utility, and 3rd across all organisations within the UK.

This concept of smart meter ping can be applied at greater scale when we do have an outage in the area. Using the smart meters of the neighbourhood, we can see which phase of the LV is impacted, enabling us to hone in much faster on the true cause of the outage without having to wait for more callers to build the picture of the unplanned outage.

In the past, our awareness of an LV fault relied solely on public reports due to the absence of monitoring systems. However, the advent of smart meters has revolutionized this process, enabling real-time monitoring and automated fault detection and response. We now have monitors along the LV circuit. When a smart meter reports loss of service or voltage issues, it is now automatically linked to our control systems automations which schedules an investigation.

Restoration times is a critical indicator of performance, the minutes or hours saved from a fault happening, perhaps overnight, to a fault being fixed is no longer a function of it being noticed by the public. Oftentimes, we could have resolved the fault and restored supply before the customer even noticed they had experienced a fault.

Street-level network visibility is essential for effective capacity planning in the LV network, especially with the increasing adoption of LCTs and demand-side response initiatives. By implementing a pioneering predictive data science model, we have gained comprehensive insights into LV network utilisation. This model forecasts utilisation at all secondary substations, guiding our investment decisions to ensure timely capacity provision and support the energy transition.

Currently, 14% of our over 120,000 secondary substation transformers are equipped with monitoring equipment, and we are continuously expanding this coverage during maintenance, reinforcement, and new site developments. These monitored substations account for 28% of the households within UK Power Networks’ license areas. Remarkably, through data science and smart meter data, we now have visibility of 100% of the network.

Our methodology integrates LV monitoring data, smart meter data, and asset information from the 14% of monitored sites to train a machine learning algorithm that identifies underlying trends and relationships. This algorithm is then applied to the remaining unmonitored network, predicting utilization levels. Sites identified as highly utilised are reviewed by our expert planners to determine the actual conditions. This combination of data science and expert analysis allows us to efficiently manage the entire network, a task that would be otherwise unmanageable with over 120,000 transformers.

This project ensures that we can proactively address capacity needs, ultimately leading to improved reliability and service for our customers. By preventing overutilisation and ensuring timely upgrades, we enhance the stability of the energy supply, thus supporting our customers in the transition to a low-carbon future.

As more people opt for low-carbon, electric alternatives, the demand on the electricity network continues to rise. Through data, forecasting and cross-sector coordination, UK Power Networks’ DSO is working to maximise the use of flexibility as a smart, cost-effective solution to this rising demand, helping to enable the transition to Net Zero at a faster pace and lower cost for all.

Our new day-ahead product was created in collaboration with the national system operator to ensure the national and regional flexibility markets complement each other, providing more opportunities for marketplace providers.

The day-ahead forecast leverages machine learning algorithms that gather the latest weather data and demand information from the network and produce a 2-day ahead forecast at 19 of our flex zone sites with half-hour resolution, we have additional capability to introduce conservativism with a probabilistic forecast, letting us ensure network stability through data. This enables us to automatically create a dispatch schedule that dispatches flexibility service providers via API.

The distribution day-ahead product is designed to align with other day-ahead markets and enable revenue stacking, where assets can take part in multiple different markets.
In 2023-24 UK Power Networks DSO dispatched seven times as much operational flexibility compared to the previous 12 months.

Find out more about the flexibility services we offer here.

We pioneered a data-driven approach to keep generators operational during planned outages, preventing 23 GWh of curtailment, £2 million in revenue loss, and 4,682 tonnes of carbon emissions during a 12-week outage in King’s Lynn. This demonstrates our commitment to treating all types of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) as valued customers of the DSO.

Our team developed generation and demand forecasts for the outage under various scenarios, allowing us to provide each DER customer with a day-ahead maximum export limit based on actual network conditions instead of worst-case scenarios. Traditionally, planned network work reduces capacity and limits energy export. In King’s Lynn, such work would have halted green energy exports from all seven solar farm sites for 12 weeks.

Our Data Team conducted detailed real-time modelling with a custom tool to analyse the precise impact of these exports on the network. This analysis showed sufficient headroom to continue exporting energy safely, even in a worst-case scenario. Since the solar farm was operating below capacity, it was deemed safe to continue operations despite the maintenance work.

Throughout the 12-week period, UK Power Networks provided daily export limits to the solar farm, enabling equal capacity distribution among all generators based on real-time modelling. This proactive approach, facilitated by our forecast outage planning tool, allowed the renewable energy generated during this time to offset approximately 4,500 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to taking 2,250 cars off the road.

This marks the first-time operational forecasts have been used in this manner. The collaboration between our dedicated DSO Data Team and the Operational Team in the UK Power Networks control room enabled us to maintain green energy production during maintenance work, showcasing our innovative efforts to support renewable energy.

UK Power Networks has 37 flexibly connected sites, representing over 250 MW of managed operational DER, with a substantial pipeline of projects expected to flexibly connect in the future.
Flexible connections means that a generator has accepted a cheaper and faster connection where reinforcement costs were avoided entirely, however, the operator may curtail them during moments of high-network congestion. The DSO’s performance on curtailment in 2023/24 was >99% efficiency, up 89% from 91.1% in 2022/23.

A common request from our flexibly connected generators was to have better foresight of curtailment. The DSO provided a suite of curtailment data that included 2-years of historical curtailment activity on a site-specific basis for maximum transparency and accountability. Alongside this, we provide 1-minute updating network constraint data that can be hit by API and integrated into market involvement strategies.

This year, we went one step further and produced a world first operational short-term curtailment forecasting system, driven by our underlying machine learning competencies saw system. The forecasts offer 3 probabilistic scenarios of the 99th, 90th and 50th percentiles, with a 30-minute updating forecast looking 2-days into the future with half-hourly intervals. This software enabled critical developments that bring real value to our customers.

As a result, UK Power Networks has the country’s most comprehensive flexible-connection offering, whereby a connected generator accesses a cheaper and faster connection subject to curtailment during network congestion.

Our Enhanced Curtailment Reports leverage technology and data to help customers make more informed decisions about how and where to locate new energy assets like solar, wind and battery storage. Additionally, UK Power Networks believes the service will ultimately get renewable energy onto the network more quickly and at lower costs, paving the way for a grid that can more readily accommodate the growth in renewable energy.

Our in-house developed software enables the planning team to rapidly iterate connection scenarios using real background power flow data and the whole connections queue. In under 1-minute, a rigorous simulation of the network for a whole year is analysed, reporting on the expected curtailment should all the connections be energised ahead of your application. This report has transformed the understanding of a connection offer from networks.

The development of this service involved extensive consultations with customers, including a joint consultation with fellow distribution network operator, National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED).

From May 2024, all customers receiving a flexible connection quote will automatically be given an Advanced Curtailment Report, which provides a breakdown of curtailment for each of the different network constraints which could impact on their site, and how much impact their potential asset could have on each of the each of the network assets.

The report also provides more information about the other sites ahead of them in the connection queue, including the capacity, technology and application date, as well as the ratings of the constraint linked to the site. To further aid developers’ understanding about each site, UK Power Networks provides detailed, half-hourly data on exactly when and by how much their site is forecasted to be curtailed.

Following the testing of this service with an example report, Ed Birkett, New Projects Director at Low Carbon, said, “These new curtailment reports are a step change in the data that UK Power Networks is providing to its customers. The new data will definitely allow customers to make a more informed choice on whether or not to accept and progress with connection offers.”

UK Power Networks has been collaborating with the ESO to implement a Megawatt (MW) Dispatch service in the SPN network.

Through coordination and data exchange with our control room, the project will enable ESO to instruct DER units to reduce their output at times of system constraint, while our DSO dispatches the generators.

This solution enables customers to receive constraint payments for the electricity they would have otherwise generated. This will, in turn, provide a cheaper alternative to the existing constraint management process used within the balancing mechanism, helping to reduce costs for consumers.

Customers are currently being onboarded to participate in this service, which will be further developed to include other dispatch scenarios.

Continuing the theme of open access to data, UK Power Networks has made it easier than ever before for local authorities to deliver their Net Zero plans. 88% of the 133 local authorities in UK Power Networks’ region have declared climate emergencies and have undertaken to deliver Net Zero by 2050 in line with the UK Government’s commitment. Our pioneering approach to data is providing more than 160 datasets all in one place. In partnership with local authorities, such as Essex County Council and the Greater London Authority, we have identified a series of datasets needed by local authorities to inform Net Zero plans. They are available for anyone to use, on UK Power Networks’ Open Data Portal and will be continuously updated.

Datasets ranging from wind speeds, flood zones and socio-economic data to electricity network maps and information showing where there is spare electrical capacity, are free to use. Most of the information on the portal is coming from partners, highlighting the importance of working collaboratively and going beyond the energy industry. Having truly open, local, data such as this all-in-one place will help local authorities understand where to start and what factors they need to consider in order to reach Net Zero quickly and cost-effectively.

Local authorities require extensive data for developing Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs), but often lack the necessary skills, resources, and expertise for complex modelling and planning. To address this, a free, online energy planning tool called Your Local Net Zero Hub was created. This tool allows local authorities to model and cost low carbon technology strategies efficiently, transforming static plans into dynamic digital resources. It aids in decision-making, such as optimal placement of EV chargers, and provides access to 52 additional datasets, including third-party information. The tool supports geospatial mapping, data visualisation, and includes live chat support. To maximise its utility, local authorities were involved in its development through co-design workshops. Since its launch in April 2023, 99 out of 133 local authorities have been onboarded, with 87 actively using it to develop their LAEPs. Additional support includes training, case studies, podcasts, and videos, enhancing user proficiency and informed decision-making. All 133 local authority plans have been analysed, 39 have been progressed based on maturity from using our software to actually influence our investment forecasting, and 65% are actively using our software we provide to create more credible energy plans.

As part of this, we’re collaborating with Anglia Ruskin University and University of East Anglia on open data within a new tool to help local authorities quickly pinpoint where to put new green energy projects.

The IRENES Land Use Tool open data helps local authorities – not just data specialists – easily assess their options for renewable energy as part of their local area energy plans, ultimately saving valuable time and costs and streamlining their pathway to net zero by 2050.

UK Power Networks has 10.2 GW of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) generators, representing capacity from >3000 customer sites and 190,000 domestic solar and battery installations. This represents 30% of all distributed generation in the country and represents the national generation capacity. It consists of 1423 solar sites with 2.2 GW capacity, 927 fossil fuel sites with 3.5 GW capacity, 250 Biogas sites with 1.1 GW capacity and 56 battery energy storage sites with 1GW capacity. There are 634 firm connected sites that have >1 MW capacity, and an additional 37 flexibly connected sites, who have accepted a cheaper and faster connection, subject to curtailment during periods of constraint. These latter firm and flexible connections are under the new DSO Operations teams customer service and have received a transformation in data transparency since the formation of the DSO in April 2023.

We have improved data and information access to help Distributed Energy Resource (DER) customers, such as solar farms and storage operators, connect more efficiently and maximize revenue. The transition to the DSO brought significant enhancements in curtailment data, resulting in an 89% reduction in curtailment from 8.7% in 2022/23 to less than 1.0% in 2023/24, meaning >99% network availability for our 37 flexible-connection generators, avoiding approximately 4 GWh of annual lost output per connection.

We share detailed information on headroom, power flow, historic curtailment, and connection queues via the Network Operational Data Dashboard, helping customers avoid unproductive applications. We also provide extensive curtailment data through our Open Data Portal, aiding in investment decisions by offering transparency on historical curtailment events. Our use of AI for personalised curtailment forecasts, along with a daily Operational Plan detailing outages, has been well-received. This comprehensive data provision supports DER customers in planning connections, securing funding, and making informed operational decisions to maximise their revenue, fostering trust through transparency and accountability.

We increased DER customer satisfaction by 20 percentage points between March and November 2023, from 60.8% to 80.8%, projecting an additional 10 percentage points to June 2024.

Vegetation Management is core to protecting customers from outages but there are many ways we can prioritise which trees to cut. A significant portion of tree cutting is reactive, typically driven by storm events. However, remaining budget is spent cutting proactively. UKPN data analytics team has developed an optimisation model to inform which trees we should proactively cut based off business priorities such as customer interruptions (CI), customer minutes lost (CML), worst served customers, and location risk.

UKPN collects lidar data across our Southern and Eastern networks, which identifies the distances between our overhead power lines and vegetation growing around or under them. The data is converted into a prediction-based model in combination with other datasets relevant to our customer base, including the number of customers connected to a particular span, historic network performance, vulnerable customer data, among others. Through a custom interactive web application, the business now prioritises tree cutting by tweaking the most salient parameters at that moment and input budget and contractor constraints. For example, if the business has particular focus on improving CML performance then all the user needs to do is drag the CML weighting up on the web page and the tree cutting plan will instantly update to reflect this preference.

Moreover, we previously struggled to evaluate the future risk we were carrying from fast growing vegetation. Projecting forward to vegetation growth to understand future risks was thought impossible due to the complexity of the challenge and computational constraints. However, utilising powerful distributed compute power, we are now able to use lidar data to calculate growth rates of the vegetation near our network assets, allowing us to project when in the future vegetation becomes a problem allowing us to be proactive and data driven in our strategy.

These two solutions, combined in a single user-friendly app, have already enabled us to protect more customers, moved the business away for multiple systems and spreadsheet and plan further ahead than we have before.

The tool considered 6,000 spans and within these prioritised 1,500 spans (a contractor capacity constraint). Using the tool we have secured:
• 15% more customers overall.
• 29% more worst served customers.
• 1% more customers suffering short interruptions.
• 14% more high safety risk (ESQCR) poles.

UK Power Networks has proved to be the most reliable of Britain’s DNOs, out-performing the Ofgem targets by 33% in customer interruptions (CI) and 35% in customer minutes lost (CML) across the eight years of the RIIO-ED1 price control period that ran from 2015/16 to 2022/23.

Optimise Prime, one of UK Power Networks’ most important innovation projects of recent years, concluded its live trials in June 2022. Started in 2019, this was a large-scale trial collecting real world data from over 6,000 commercial EVs, providing unparalleled insight into the future of electric fleets and the needs of businesses regarding EV charging infrastructure.

A joint project with Hitachi, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks along with the UK’s biggest fleet operators – Uber, Royal Mail and British Gas – the project gathered data on when, where and how often employees charge their work EVs, be that on the go, at home or in a depot. This enormously valuable dataset has now been released on UK Power Networks’ Open Data platform and is available for anyone to analyse and use for their own purposes.

UK Power Networks is committed to maximum possible transparency of data, so anyone working towards enabling the Net Zero economy has open access to an unparalleled dataset that will help shape low carbon transportation. For example, insights into where more public chargers will be needed by 2030 to support charging for all 45,000 London Uber drivers and the required electricity network upgrades will be shared with local authorities to support their community decarbonisation plans.

Our Distribution Network Options Assessment (DNOA) 2024 outlines the innovative ways we are preparing our network for the transition to Net Zero at lowest cost to our customers through transparency, new solutions and wider system benefits.

The DNOA Methodology is an annual publication and governance process to help optimise future investment decisions. It outlines where, when and how UK Power Networks will seek to secure additional electrical capacity in the next five years to meet demand – be that through flexibility or by building new infrastructure.
We use it to showcase the options available and make recommendations for the lowest-cost option for our customers, based on market testing, which we then submit to our Supervisory Board for approval.

Providing transparency on how we’ll deliver capacity at a local level, our latest DNOA Methodology explains our work with neighbouring DNO, Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) and other local stakeholders to explore options to meet capacity needs in the Willesden area of West London, just outside of our licence area. By absorbing some of this capacity need on our network, we can release capacity on the transmission grid and effectively get SSEN customers connected more quickly.

This year marks the first end-to-end application of the DNOA process. Since its first release in 2023, we have incorporated customer feedback to finetune the DNOA methodology, make improvements to the data included and outline a roadmap for future improvements.

See our Distribution Future Energy Scenario for 2024 here.

A new feature of the DSO is to maximise engagement with critical stakeholders in the net zero transition, such as local authorities, operational DER, developers, flexibility service providers, and more. This engagement is intended to help the network understand the needs and wants of those groups that have key influence on successfully meeting the nation’s net zero targets.

UK Power Networks published 31 new data initiatives in 2023/24 regulatory period, up from 14 in the 2022/23 period. This was heavily bolstered by the new emphasis from the DSO on unlocking real value through data.

The most notable uptick in value was targeted at the connections challenge, providing data to developers and power system consultancies to understand and be informed about accessing capacity on the distribution network. New datasets for developers can be categorised into network model information, connections queue details, historical power flow data, asset ratings, operating conditions, import and export sensitivity factors, outage and fault data, generation profiles and assumptions, curtailment history, and curtailment methodologies.

The ability to publish this level of data provision is a direct result of our heavy investment in data analytics competencies and IT infrastructure. Our customers have benefitted by being able to interpret in detail connection offers, which enables a bankable business decision on whether to proceed with a connection. We observe substantially more renewable energy generation has accepted a connection guided by our data. Our customers have called our data provision a ‘godsend’, with many customers publicly supporting our efforts via a public Ofgem call for evidence to support DSO panel performance.

DER customers told us the cost of connecting to our networks can sometimes make their projects unviable, so we worked to make it cheaper.

In 2018, we undertook several innovations to reduce the amount of infrastructure we need to build, saving customers’ money and allowing cheaper connections to our networks.

Collaboration: We collaborated with international partners to look for new technologies that unlock existing assets. We are now installing the world’s first load balancer at a distribution network level. This advanced technology is now being deployed in Colchester, East England, enabling an additional 95MW for customer connections and saving customers £8m.

Multi-targeted approach: We created a programme of works to combine advanced analytics, monitoring and targeted network upgrades aimed at releasing more capacity at lowest cost. This programme has led to the release of 182MW in our southern network, SPN, and 327MW in our eastern network, EPN for additional connections.
In total, these initiatives have created over 3GW of new capacity (assuming the average cost of new renewable generation capacity is £1m per MW). This in turn could allow £500m of additional investment of renewable generation into our networks and even greater value for money for our customers.

In 2019 we partnered with leading companies from the UK, US and Australia in scaling up our active network management system. This is an advanced digital platform that allows our network to be more efficient, freeing up capacity for our customers and enabling additional connections without costly and time-consuming reinforcement.

We are now the first DNO in the country to begin rolling this out across the entirety of our network. These initiatives, coupled with our long-term regional development plans, have enabled us to significantly increase network capacity and provide the new lower cost connection offerings that our customers asked us for.

Outcomes:

• More than 3GW additional capacity
• Up to £500m of investment opportunity for local generation
• Offering more choice and new products to customers

Across our network, we’ve connected more than 170,000 generators, including enough renewable energy to power 3.5m homes. In certain areas, such a large volume of distributed generation creates constraints on capacity, voltage or reverse power flows. Traditionally, this meant that new generators looking to connect would need to spend time and money on physical network upgrades to remove those constraints before they could connect.

Flexible connections allow owners of distributed generation to connect cheaper and faster by removing the upfront cost and time of network reinforcement. All generators need to do is agree to temporarily reduce the amount of energy they export at certain times to keep our network within its operational limits.

Our world-leading Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) completes forecasting, power flow, fault and contingency analysis to optimise the network. DERMS will enable over 500MW of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), mostly renewable energy like wind and solar, in total to connect to the network cheaper and faster. That’s enough capacity to power more than a quarter of a million homes without the need to spend time and money building new electricity infrastructure. So far, UK Power Networks has connected over 117MW of generation from 2014 using the DERMS system. It has saved our customers more than £70m to date, since 2015 and saved 20,394 tonnes of CO2, which is the equivalent environmental benefit of planting 250,000 trees. With a healthy pipeline of over 3.5GW progressing to connection, over the next two years, we are expecting to more than triple the existing savings, even if 10% of the connections pipeline materialised.

We are scaling up our reactive power marketplace capability, targeting customer savings of at least £100m by 2050 whilst enabling more renewable generation to connect. In 2020, we piloted a world-first reactive power marketplace to manage transmission voltage constraints, supporting system stability whilst reducing curtailment of renewable generation. Engagement with the DER market and ESO helped us tackle the practical issues and develop the market rules needed to balance commercial and technical constraints in real-time. We are now embedding reactive power capabilities into our Distributed Energy Resource Management System and implementing signals with customers receiving new flexible connections to enable reactive power capability in readiness for when the ESO rolls out the service.

Throughout 2023, UK Power Networks made significant progress with DER flexible connections. In the 2022/23 period, UKPN awarded 1.5 GW of flexible contracts to DER and aggregators. These contracts allow for increased demand or reduced supply during periods of excess power, enhancing the network’s capacity without immediate infrastructure investments. UKPN’s innovative and collaborative efforts are pivotal in supporting the transition to a smarter, more flexible electricity network, crucial for achieving the UK’s Net Zero targets.

Customers don’t always need a connection which is available for 24 hrs per day at full capacity. Timed or profiled connections can, in the right circumstances, provide cheaper connection solutions for customers, especially in areas where there is a lot of renewable energy.

Timed connections allow customers to connect cheaper, using energy within two or three different daily time windows. Profiled connections could have up to 48 different half-hourly periods where customers can, for example, charge electric vehicles.

Some London bus garages are already benefitting from quicker and cheaper connections thanks to timed connections. Profiled connections were also trialled with Royal Mail vans at depots as part of the Optimise Prime project, to keep the connection cost as cheap as possible in Royal Mail fleet electrification. Having proven successful and demonstrating the value, we will offer profiled connections to our customers as BAU in 2023.

Power Potential is a ground-breaking collaboration between National Grid ESO (NGESO), UK Power Networks and generators on the south coast distribution network. It is a world-first demonstration of a regional reactive power market. Through Power Potential, NGESO can access DER resources to provide additional operational tools for managing voltage and thermal transmission constraints.

It is also a UK-first demonstration of a Distribution System Operator facilitating distributed energy resources (DER) to provide dynamic voltage control services.

In 2019, UK Power Networks tested and delivered the initial live DERMS system, signed up five customers (battery, solar and wind) to deliver 150 Mvar of service and completed laboratory testing with five DER controllers. We then commissioned five customers in 2020. In partnership with National Grid ESO, between October 2020 and March 2021, Power Potential completed its live trials of the end-end service. The DER declared their availability and bid prices day-ahead, National Grid ESO made its procurement decision for a ‘virtual power plant’ of DER, and then DERMS enabled the service delivery with the DER.

The trials successfully proved that the concept works and identified several areas for improvement as well as considerations for how it could be made business as usual. Learnings from the project are also informing National Grid ESO’s work on the future of balancing services and reactive markets. The partners in the project are continuing to use the learnings and solutions from the trial in an extension of the Regional Development Programme partnership between National Grid ESO and UK Power Networks. In July 2021 as part of our initial business plan for RIIO-ED2 (the next regulatory period for electricity distribution) we committed to work with NGESO to deliver a business as usual Power Potential offering by 2028.

Our Flexible Connections enable cheaper and faster connections for generators. Generally a ‘last in, first out’ (LIFO) rule applies to curtail output when there are capacity restraints.
Energy Exchange has developed a commercial design for a more efficient and cost-effective approach – market-based curtailment trading mechanism (MBCM). The scale of benefits depends on the participant mix, but our core simulation of trading shows a 43% reduction in total curtailment costs.
As well as reducing total costs due to curtailment, MBCM creates new market and revenue opportunities for the additional participants in constraint management – generators on conventional firm connections who are not normally curtailed, and demand customers including batteries willing to increase demand to prevent curtailment. A MBCM could signal where there should be future distribution network reinforcement to reduce curtailment, and encourage battery storage providers to locations where they can absorb and avoid curtailment for renewable generators.

We set out to quantify how MBCM could reduce generators’ total lost revenue due to curtailment. The project has identified three sources of enabled value:

• Generators trade distribution curtailment to an efficient total cost and volume.
• Demand customers, including batteries, increase demand to prevent distribution curtailment
• Generation and demand customers on the distribution network participate in managing curtailment on the transmission network.

We identified that half of planned future generation connection capacity is earmarked for flexible connections, so the total curtailment is expected to increase. The annual benefits from MBCM as opposed to LIFO range from £6,500-£27,000/MW of flexible connection capacity, with individual benefits highly dependent on the similarity of the local generation mix.

We presented the Energy Exchange concept and early insights to flexible connection customers at our customer forum, and to other key stakeholders including electricity networks, Ofgem, BEIS, DER and market platform providers. We have built their feedback into the approach. We have now scoped the next stage of contract, system and process development to apply Energy Exchange to planned outages in our South Eastern Power Networks licence area, moving towards Business as Usual application in 2022.

For the past five years, we have been working closely with the transmission operator National Grid ESO to deliver process improvements to manage the interaction between the distribution and transmission system as part of a Regional Development Programme (RDP) for the south coast network.

RDP looks at how to efficiently manage the complex interactions between distribution and transmission networks in areas with large amounts of transmission connections and distributed energy resources,

Since November 2020, we have been using a secure link between UK Power Networks and National Grid ESO control rooms to implement the ‘Connect and Manage’ approach to new generation connections in this area. This collaboration uses the Inter Control Centre Protocol (ICCP) link developed in our past innovation projects to deliver significant business and customer benefits. The ICCP link allows an automatic, fast and transparent solution for real-time operation to manage reverse power flow from flexible connections, which increases whole-system GB network resilience and coordination.

ICCP provides a real-time view of the volume of generation under each GSP, enabling ESO control engineers to make cost-effective decisions for managing constraints on the transmission system. This ultimately reduces the cost of balancing the energy system during transmission outages- saving £1.2m by not having to install more metering and allowing more renewable energy to connect faster.

Accelerated Loss of Mains Change Programme is a collaboration with NGESO to update the electrical protection of distributed generators (DG).  The programme offers funding support to DG as an incentive to make the necessary updates to their electrical protection as soon as possible. DG apply for funding on a portal via the ENA’s website.

We estimate the number of generators across UK Power Networks’ three licence areas impacted by this programme to be:

The programme is being delivered through defined application windows. The first application window went live on 2 October 2019, and it is currently in its eighth application window. The programme is planned to run until the Distribution Code change comes into effect on 01 September 2022.

A programme of targeted engagement has been in progress to drive more applications from UK Power Networks distributed generators. This has included distribution of letters to c.1,600 sites that have not yet applied to the programme late in 2020 which proved to be very successful in driving more applications. In April 2021, UKPN distributed letters to a further c. 800 sites. Direct phone and email communication has been ongoing with owners of sites in the 5-50 MW range in order to drive compliance from the sites with the highest impact on the system.

The following table provides summary information on the total applications received by UK Power Networks from generators or their contractors making changes under this programme.

Key progress highlights:

• 60% of the MW capacity in our areas have applied to make changes through the programme or have confirmed compliance outside of the programme.
• 70% of sites in the 5-50 MW bracket in our areas have applied through the programme or confirmed compliance outside of the programme. A further 10% so far have acknowledged or committed to making changes following our engagement.

Energy flexibility is an integral part of our transition to a DSO, allowing us to manage the network, build a more resilient grid and save money for our customers.

As more people opt for low-carbon, electric alternatives, the demand on the electricity network continues to rise.
Through data, forecasting and cross-sector coordination, UK Power Networks’ DSO is working to maximise the use of flexibility as a smart, cost-effective solution to this rising demand, helping to enable the transition to Net Zero at a faster pace and lower cost for all.

We are proud to offer the most accessible flexibility procurement in Britain – with a minimum capacity of just 10kW in each zone and support for different metering and baseline approaches.

We run day ahead tenders on an ongoing basis, and long term tenders twice a year, as well as ad hoc smaller tenders to manage planned outage needs.

For our Spring 2024 tender we are looking to procure 122MW of flexibility across 260 zones.

In the 2023/24 period, UKPN awarded 1.5 GW of flexible contracts to distributed energy resources and aggregators, enhancing network capacity during periods of excess power.

All this work builds on previous flexibility tenders, including awarding contracts for more than 1GW of flexible power from our Winter 2022 Flex Tender – our biggest ever flexibility tender award and still the UK’s highest value tender. This year we awarded over 1GW in flexibility contracts and dispatched over 7GWh, more than five times higher than 2022/23. We were the first DNO to procure flexibility back in 2019, and over the years we have developed strong relationships with flexibility providers and insights into what does and does not work in practice. We continue to set the pace, learn through iteration, and share what we learn for the benefit of all GB customers.

Stakeholder engagement is a key pillar for UK Power Networks in enabling the flexibility market, allowing us to provide regular updates and capture feedback. While we have significantly expanded the market year-on-year by making more zones available, our latest tender looked to procure closer to real time flexibility and deliver a holistic framework from 2022 onwards off the back of customer feedback. From extra high voltage network right down to the low voltage network, we’re opening revenue opportunities to more people. We were the first network operator in the UK to offer flexibility at the low voltage level, and the only one to offer contracts for as little as 10kW (equivalent to four homes) across our product range, helping to unlock residential access and participation in flexibility markets. As a result, we have seen rapid growth in residential flexibility participating in our tenders which accounts for almost a third of our contract awards.

We are leading a national effort for standardised flexibility products across networks by chairing the ENA’s Open Networks project and we have supported the development and implemented standardised flexibility contracts and evaluation methodologies. We are also making more information available on our recently launched flexibility hub including zone data files and new market reports.

Security of supply, affordability and sustainability remain the three priorities of an effective, balanced energy system. That’s why we’re taking a flexibility-first approach to planning the future of our network.

In April 2023, UK Power Networks launched the country’s first ever independent Distribution System Operator. We are proud to publish our first ever DSO Performance Panel Report outlining the benefits we have delivered and the transformational changes underway in our business.

We have set ourselves ambitious targets including a reduction in network reinforcement costs of over £400m by 2028.

To reach these targets requires a big push from us to develop flexibility markets in the areas we serve. Well-functioning markets require information and trust, which is why we have also committed to strong governance measures to guarantee the DSO’s independence and transparency of decision-making.

We have guaranteed its independence by establishing the DSO as a separate legal entity, with its own independent supervisory board, executive management level representation within UK Power Networks and clear incentives from our regulator, Ofgem.

We are constantly looking for new opportunities to use smart interventions such as flexibility services to help us better manage the network, and for the first time this summer we have used flexibility to support a network outage.

Find out more about our flexibility offerings here.

Our Shift project has unlocked 350MW of contracted flexibility capacity, successfully deferring £95.5 million in network reinforcement by 2028. This effort has led to a 493% expansion in flexibility tender locations, resulting in the highest flexibility award of any Distribution Network Operator (DNO), encompassing 60 Low Voltage (LV) locations.

A significant aspect of our work has been stimulating new participation from domestic batteries and EVs achieving a three-fold increase to 248MW—equivalent to the output of a gas-fired power station. Smart EV charging has emerged as critical to enabling the lowest cost electrification of transport, a pressing need as consumers face rising living costs. As more people adopt low-carbon lifestyles, demand on the electricity grid increases, with customers seeking greater control over how and when they charge their vehicles. Project Shift ensures that people can easily access the benefits of the rapidly expanding flexibility market while supporting the broader adoption of EVs.

We partnered with Kaluza, Octopus Energy, and ev.energy to explore ways to help local residents join the energy ‘flexibility’ market and reduce the costs of running their EVs. Together, we developed and trialled three different incentives to promote EV charging outside of peak times, making it more attractive for EV owners.

This collaboration resulted in the world’s largest trial of smart charging incentives, demonstrating that only 19% of the time customers spend plugged in at home is needed to meet their charging needs. This makes ‘smart charging’ viable for individuals willing to shift their charge times to periods of lower demand on the electricity network, thereby utilising cheaper, greener electricity to charge their cars for the next day.

Our findings revealed that 85% of customers were open to smart charging, provided their mobility needs were met. Smart charging effectively reduced evening peak demand by an average of 79% through ongoing financial incentives. This allows customers to charge their cars at a lower cost during specific times and earn rewards, while also mitigating the need for reinforcing local electricity networks.

William Goldsmith, Head of Grid & Data Services at ev.energy, remarked: “It’s been fantastic working with UK Power Networks on such world-leading innovation, and I am delighted that the learnings from Project Shift have already been integrated into UK Power Networks’ first-of-a-kind flexibility tenders. Charging electric vehicles smartly to unlock grid services is a critical part of delivering a green, affordable energy future. This can only be done by engaging and incentivising EV drivers to take part.”

We have proven that flexibility works, both technical and commercially. We are using flexibility to manage 30% of sites that need additional capacity, with over 40% of total contracted flexibility coming from EVs and other residential load. This supports more than 650 substations serving hundreds of thousands of customers who can connect their EV or heat pump when they are ready.

Flexibility has delivered £91m in customer benefits through avoided network reinforcement in 2023/24.
We believe everyone should be able to participate in flexibility markets. We run twice-yearly flexibility tenders with the lowest participation threshold (10kW) of any DSO, allowing portfolios of domestic EVs and storage to provide flexibility alongside larger assets. As a result, over 40% of our total flexibility comes from EVs and other residential load.

Our 10kW threshold remains 100 times lower than the minimum threshold for participating in National Grid ESO services and we are pleased to see other DSOs committing to reduce their thresholds to this level. We also take a pragmatic approach to meter requirements to allow these growing segments to take part.

We recently saw customer benefits on a mostly congested part of our Network at Farcet. We were able to use around 1MW of demand turn from customers that are connected to the Power-Ups programme. In turn, this relieved the constraints in congested part of our network where otherwise generators would have been restricted to produce 1MW of electricity. Having this 1MW of demand turn in Farcet meant that, at times when our network constraints existed, offering a demand turn up meant that saved electrical capacity could be used elsewhere on the network.

Already this year, we have seen the Power-Ups project work exceptionally well during extreme weather conditions. For example, the Power-Ups project was fundamental in maintaining a stable energy supply across the country during Storm Isha in January 2024. By looking at our forecasting tool, which reflected excess wind generation around the Lawford area, Octopus Power-Ups allowed us to send dispatches during the peak of the storm due to excess wind creating green energy.

Similarly, over the Christmas period, excess wind generation allowed Octopus Power-Ups customers to have 4 hours of free electricity via Octopus. Being able to use excess wind created during storms has been a game-changer in using green energy more effectively. Looking to the future, we expect to be able to use the Power-Ups project on a bigger scale during storms and in the summer when we usually see excess energy created from solar farms. Being able to capitalise on this green energy, is revolutionising in the flexibility space.

Power-Ups is a first-of-its-kind collaboration that endeavours to tackle the issue of overgeneration the project, strategically implemented in conjunction with Octopus Energy, stands as a testament to the commitment of UK Power Networks in the quest to reach Net Zero by 2050.

The Powerful-CB project aims to demonstrate that fault-limiting circuit breakers (FLCBs) can enable distribution network operators (DNOs) to connect more distributed generation (DG) to fault level constrained 11 kV electricity networks without the need for reinforcement.

We have been working with our technology partner to develop a FLCB for use at primary substations and it operates 20 times faster than existing vacuum circuit breakers. This is the world’s first demonstration of a FLCB with a fast-commutating switch.

This high-speed operation can mitigate fault level contributions from distributed generation, allowing us to connect more DG to fault-level constrained networks including dense urban areas where space may be constrained using other fault mitigation technologies.

If proven successful, Powerful CB could facilitate the connection of more distributed generation faster and more cost effectively, potentially saving customers across Great Britain up to £400m by 2050.

UK Power Networks Smart Connect portal has revolutionised the process of connecting low carbon technology to the local electricity network. Described as a ‘game-changer’ by Octopus Energy, the industry-first portal has made it faster and easier than ever before for customers to be part of the transition to net zero and go electric.
Smart Connect uses a combination of automation and innovative rules-based network assessments to automatically assess connections and respond to customers. The portal allows users to get an instant decision on whether they can connect domestic electric vehicle charge points, heat pumps, battery storage or solar PV, to the local electricity network without further work. It removes the need for multiple paper forms, streamlining and speeding up the process. We developed and launched Smart Connect after close collaboration with project partner Octopus Electric Vehicles to address feedback that the old process for domestic vehicle-to-grid projects were confusing and time-consuming. The portal was trailed with different customers including domestic consumers to ensure it is fit for purpose and scalable in turn enabling UK Power Networks to facilitate more clean technologies as customers take part in the transition to net zero.

At Launch, Albena Ivanova, Octopus Electric Vehicles, said: “The launch of the portal will be a game changer for customers and installers alike, making the connection assessment and process fast and transparent.”

We didn’t stop there, over the last two years since Smart Connect’s launch we have continuously expanded it capabilities, this includes expanding EVCP notification up to 22kW, allowing Solar PV & Battery Storage Fast Track (SGI-2 and SGI-3 applications) and up to 50kW of generation applications. Meaning even more applications are able to be raised and approved faster through our Smart Connect Portal.

Since its launch Smart Connect has handled over 163,000 applications faster and easier than before. Over 81% of all those applications have been automatically approved, that’s over 114,000 Low Carbon Technologies connected faster and easier than before.

For 2024 this auto approval rate is up to over 83%, nearly 22,000 applications automatically approved so far this year. These auto approved applications save the customer and the installer an average of five days.

Based on information submitted by installers, we can proactively contact customers to arrange an upgrade to their electricity supply if required. Less than 15% of applications handled by Smart Connect this year were referred for this service, providing a faster, seamless and scalable service to support growing LCT uptake.
In 2024, the average time a customer waits from their installer applying to gaining approval, including applications where further work is required is just 7 days. This shows the large steps we have taken to make this process as quick, easy, and as scalable as possible.

Looking wider to other DNOs across the UK, their average auto approval rate is 35% this shows how UK Power Networks are not only setting the benchmark, but continuing to strive to make the LCT application process to be as easy as possible removing any blockers for installers, customers or our staff to ensure that we do not stand in the way of Low Carbon adoption.
Visit the portal here.

UK Power Networks is a standard bearer in facilitating the transition to a Net Zero economy through electric vehicles, electric heating and renewable energy. We also take responsibility for our own carbon footprint and continually look for ways to reduce the environmental impact of our business.

Our environmental strategy is to minimise our impact, lead by example and support the transition to a Net Zero. In 2017/18, we launched our Green Action Plan. We are taking a long-term view of our environmental responsibilities.

As part of our Green Action Plan, we’ve replaced 660,000 virgin plastic bottles with 100% recycled plastic, and our property estate is now supplied on a contract using 100% renewable energy. Other key successes include:

• Saving 2,000 tonnes of carbon by deploying the new amorphous steel transformers at scale
  3,600 miles saved per year by reducing inefficiencies in the supply chain
• Reduced the plastic incorporated in water bottles by half and greenhouse gases associated with manufacturing by 70%, saving 41,000+ litres of fuel oil in the manufacturing process
  The battery chainsaws will help improve work conditions for 200 people for 9,400+ hours a year, by reducing harmful emissions and fuel wastage
• Eliminated 290 hard cases for our power tools – equivalent to 150,000 plastic bags.
• 6,000 tonnes of carbon saved annually by purchasing 100% renewable energy

RDPs are projects that identify where reinforcements are preventing customers from connecting to the network and aim to provide tools and resources to help.
This allows Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to connect faster, ahead of reinforcement which, in some cases, is planned for 10+ years. This whole-systems approach requires collaboration between UK Power Networks, National Grid Electricity Transmission and National Grid Electricity System Operator.

This approach to allowing DERs to connect early will reduce customer costs by better managing the clear dependencies between the Transmission and Distribution Network and assisting the journey to the UK becoming Net Zero by 2050.

UK Power Networks has two RDP areas, the Eastern area and the South East. Both networks face challenges with transmission network upgrades due as late as 2030 and beyond. Drivers for the transmission reinforcement include large offshore wind and nuclear generation planned in the East and interconnectors in the South East.
You can find out more about our RDPs here.

UK Power Networks has been collaborating with the ESO to implement a Megawatt (MW) Dispatch service in the SPN network.

Through coordination and data exchange with our control room, the project will enable ESO to instruct DER units to reduce their output at times of system constraint, while our DSO dispatches the generators.

This solution enables customers to receive constraint payments for the electricity they would have otherwise generated. This will, in turn, provide a cheaper alternative to the existing constraint management process used within the balancing mechanism, helping to reduce costs for consumers.

Customers are currently being onboarded to participate in this service, which will be further developed to include other dispatch scenarios.
Access the service here

In the context of RDP, an N-3 Operational Tripping Scheme (OTS) is a mechanism to ensure that the transmission network remains within its safe limits during an N-3 event.
An N-3 event occurs when a ‘double circuit fault’ on the transmission network takes place while a transmission circuit is under maintenance. This is considered to be a once-in-a-hundred-year event. The N-3 Operational tripping scheme can disconnect DERs feeding into the impacted part of the transmission network within 30 seconds of the N-3 event.

Local authorities we serve have asked for support with their Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) applications. With competition for funding, limited time and budget, local authorities have to ensure their bids are as strong as possible to secure vital funding – both in in planning and delivery – to deliver for customers and keep on track with broader climate targets

The key objectives of the projects are:

1. Support LEVI Tranche 2 Local authorities by ensuring their bids and applications are as strong and as well evidenced as possible.
2. Save local authorities time in preparing and submitting their applications for funding with deliverables specifically designed for LEVI bid work.
3. Evaluate locations for public charging in collaboration with all stakeholders to ensure the right chargers are placed in the right location at the right time
4. Enable forecasting to be as accurate as possible, through the provision of hyper granular demand datasets

Working with CENEX and ZapMap, UKPN will combine hypergranular data with market expertise with our cabling data to help local authorities get more for their money and increase the quality of their applications.

The Green Recovery fund is allowing us to continue to help ensure reliable supplies for now and in the future to meet the Government’s plans for Net Zero.

There was a clear, strong message from our stakeholders, that there are a wide range of projects ready and raring to go within our area. In total 360 applications were received for the Green Recovery programme. Applicants from all areas bid in to the programme, from commercial fleet operators to local councils and community groups. In particular a strong response was seen in Electric Vehicle charging applications, these included councils installing local chargers on residential streets to commercial operators where the cost to connect had provided a challenge in the past.

Through the detailed review all submissions were analysed against the Green Recovery criteria. Projects were also developed on an engineering basis to identify key infrastructure challenges and to confirm estimated costs.

UK Power Networks is delivering 66 million investment, over 86 sites, to deliver low carbon energy projects that will help achieve the Government’s Ten Point Plan towards Net Zero by 2050. These applications will unlock 147MVA of capacity and will provide:

Significant capacity at 11 Motorway Service Areas to enable capacity for more than 600 ultra fast 150kW chargers.
Range of Local Authority and Commercially Operated local charging hubs to enable 500 rapid 50kW chargers.
Community and public building heat and renewable generation projects.
The Thames Estuary is one of many sites to benefit. The clock is ticking on Net Zero so 86 projects are being fast-tracked by the electricity firm, including Electric Vehicle charging hubs at motorway service stations, fleets of electric buses, community energy schemes and heat pumps.

Net Zero Marine Services (NZMS) has secured capital from UK Power Networks’ Green Recovery Fund programme to support its power infrastructure along the Thames. NZMS are developing seven shore power locations in central London. These locations will create a network of high voltage power infrastructure facilities available for all Thames operators.

As part of the works, UK Power Networks will pull through new cables and install equipment that will allow for the electrification of boats along the Thames. This means less carbon emissions, reduced water contamination and cleaner air.

Road transport accounts for around 30% of the UK’s carbon emissions, and so the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is a key part of the puzzle in achieving Net Zero. There are clear signs that industry and customers agree: many car manufacturers, including Ford, Volvo and Mini are now committed to selling an all-electric feet by the 2030s, and the sale of EVs has seen a huge increase in the past few years, with over one in five new cars sold in the UK in 2022 being an EV.

Currently, a typical EV produces just a third of the emissions of an equivalent petrol vehicle, and this will continue to fall as technologies mature and the carbon intensity of electricity generation falls further. Alongside largescale investment in EV infrastructure, this means that we’re going to see an exponential growth in the number of EVs on our roads and connecting to our electricity grid.

We predict there will be over five million EVs by 2030 in London, the East and the South East of England alone.
As the scale of the EV transition has increased, we have worked hard to ensure that we can provide the network infrastructure to support this growth.

EV connections were averaging around 1,500 per month, while customers’ focus seemed to shift to solar PV, as customers looked at ways to save money on their bills in the longer term. We expect EV volumes to pick up again throughout 2023. We are adapting to this uncertainty and updating our forecasts, to ensure we are ready and prepared for any new scenario which plays out. As of February 2023, there were 403,000 EVs registered in UK Power Networks’ licence areas. This is higher than the amount predicted by both National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios and UK Power Networks’ DFES for 2022, perhaps due to these scenarios overestimating the impact of supply chain issues on uptake. In our most recent update to our DFES for 2023, released in December 2022, we have included updated battery price projections, with costs expected to increase before falling from the end of 2023. This leads to a steeper uptake from 2023 onwards.

We are also using our previous experience to help reduce connection costs via improved co-ordination and planning. Building on our work with Transport for London on electrifying the London bus fleet, we worked with BEIS to identify the most cost effective approach to roll-out ultra-fast public charging at motorway service stations to alleviate range anxiety. This co-ordinated and collaborative effort has identified savings of £40m across 19 motorway service stations.

Optimise Prime is the world’s largest trial of commercial EVs. It seeks to develop practical solutions to the challenges preventing fleet vehicle operators from going electric. Royal Mail, Centrica and Uber now have over 6,000 Electric Vehicles (EVs) taking part in the project, in partnership with UK Power Networks and Hitachi.

The solutions we’ve co designed are estimated to save customers more than £200m by 2030 and enable the faster transition to electric for commercial fleets and private hire vehicle operators. The project is also playing a vital role in helping the UK meet its carbon reduction targets. The accelerated adoption of commercial EVs will save 2.7m tonnes of CO2, equivalent to London’s entire bus fleet running for four years or a full Boeing 747-400 travelling around the world 1,484 times.

One of the key solutions developed is a flexible demand connection offering called a profiled connection which has been trialled as part of the Depot Trial and extends the timed connection offering by providing up to 48 half-hourly time slots in which the maximum power requirement can potentially be varied. This allows customers who have flexible loads, such as EVs in the case of Optimise Prime, to control the imported power by using behind the meter smart control solutions to follow an agreed profile which will result in the increased utilisation of existing network capacity, avoiding costly reinforcements and resulting in quicker connections for customers. Having proven this is successful in helping our customers, profiled connections will be offered to our customers from the beginning of 2023.

In a first for the industry, UK Power Networks also launched a new ‘site planning tool’ in 2022 as part of the project, revolutionising the process of going electric for businesses across the UK. The tool is making it quicker and easier than ever before for fleets to make the switch to EVs. A simple online system, it has been designed for any fleet manager to assess how to go electric at lowest cost.

Electrifying a fleet is a complex process. Managers must consider what vehicles are needed on which routes, when they are needed and where there is space to charge. By inputting information such as vehicle schedules, mileage and site energy profiles, to the tool easily compares different scenarios to understand the impact of going electric and the benefits of using smart charging.

The tool also checks if a site needs an electricity connection upgrade, or if a fleet can operate on the existing connection. As a result, distribution network operators have a better understanding of customers’ needs, reducing the need for costly, time-consuming upgrades and ultimately accelerating the uptake of electric vehicles in the transition to Net Zero.

Michael Wilmshurst, fleet business development manager at Novuna Vehicle Solutions said: “UK Power Networks’ tool is straightforward to follow and supported with some good literature. In particular, the scenario results were really interesting and I particularly liked the interactive graphs, which helps me to work out different scenarios on the optimum charging strategy to discuss with my commercial fleet clients, as they transition to electric vehicles.”

The tool includes two main features:
Site Electrification Planner: designed to give a quick estimate of the cost to connect EV charge points at existing sites based on four inputs (number of charge points planned, power rating of the charge points, site connection limit and current peak demand).
Site Planning Tool:  which requires more granular inputs and calculates the connection capacity required under different optimisation scenarios including a base case, unmanaged charging and smart charging. The results from the tool provides a good basis for discussion with the DNO.

We know that electric vehicles will play a crucial role in reaching the UK’s 2050 Net Zero carbon emissions target, but we don’t yet know how small companies will adapt. The White Van Plan project is investigating the needs of SMEs to allow us to facilitate their transition to zero emission vehicles. As part of our leadership in the Mayor of London’s EV taskforce and partnership with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), we learnt that to support small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in their EV transition, we need to understand the unique challenges faced by this large and diverse group. Hard-to-reach SMEs are likely to be left behind in the EV transition, and may struggle with transport electrification without adequate support.

White Van Plan is the first of its kind, engaging with and helping small businesses owners from all sectors make the transition to EVs. We’ve developed an extensive data set to map out how the switch to EVs might look for the 2.3 million small businesses in our area. White Van Plan has now engaged with over 1,200 small businesses across all sectors to develop extensive data sets to understand exactly what SMEs need and what UK Power Networks can do to help them make the transition. We have created a segmentation of the SME market, and gained an understanding of specific needs of SMEs which will allow us to tailor support in the transition to a low carbon economy.

David Savage, Manager of Savage & Sons Electrical Limited, Bedfordshire said:
“For small companies to be interested in EVs, it is vital they understand the potential financial benefits and get extra support, especially during the challenges we are facing right now. It’s great to hear about projects like White Van Plan aimed at helping companies like ours.”

For customers submitting more complex applications, we worked with installers to take a fresh look at the process from a customer perspective to make the process simpler and more streamlined – ensuring we are not a blocker to customers charging their Electric Vehicles or switching to a heat pump.

The ease of upgrading customers’ power supply is an important factor in a straightforward transition to LCTs. In 2022/23, UK Power Networks was the UK’s leading supplier of this type of upgrade, with a customer satisfaction score of 96.6%.
The vast majority (97%) of domestic applications for an LCT upgrade now come through our online portal and in Q4 of 2022/23, 79% of them were approved automatically, reducing the lead time by up to 10 days. This automatic processing of applications has also meant we needed 15 fewer people handling them, even though there were seven times more requests compared to 2021/22, saving money all round.

As well as making it easier to get approval for an LCT connection, we also supported solar and battery installers to use our self-service portal in order to speed up the auto-approval process. We published a video user guide and worked with third-party online influencers to promote the portal and its benefits for all installers. Our ring-fenced team provides ongoing support and proactively contacts and advises installers who are not consistently benefitting from these low-effort automated tools, enabling a faster, more streamlined experience for customers. This means customers see the benefit of lower bills more quickly, and avoid additional reinforcement costs of an average of £15,000.

UK Power Networks supported nearly 50,000 battery and solar installations in 2022/23. Nearly 40,000 households are expected to benefit from up to 61% lower electricity bills, saving them an average of £710 per year.

We’ve trained domestic battery and solar installers who will carry out 25,000 installations on behalf of local authorities across Essex, Cambridgeshire, London, Kent and Sussex through the Solar Together group, supporting them to use our self-service portal and enabling them to complete installations faster and more accurately. Customers continue to want to contact us themselves, so we engaged with our customers to develop self-service options that enable them to apply and book a home supply upgrade in under three minutes, reducing customer effort. As a direct result of this training being delivered to local authority appointed installers which cover 58% of our region, 25,000 residential solar and battery installation can be delivered much faster and efficiently.

We can now provide instant digital approval for 100% of third party meter operators to carry out fuse upgrades when on-site for the charger install, reducing customer effort and increasing speed for customers.

To deliver a roll out of charging infrastructure at scale, we need to work really closely with Local Authorities and charge point developers. A lack of easily accessible charge points is one of the biggest challenges for people who might want to switch to an electric vehicle. Companies that invest in new charge points face barriers too, because there can be high up-front investment costs combined with a set of market, policy and regulatory failures. This means that charge points aren’t as widespread as they could be in certain areas, therefore holding back the uptake of EVs.

We partnered with Cambridge to bring together councils’ local knowledge, our expertise on network capacity and forecast EV uptake, and CPOs’ delivery experience to ensure charge points are planned in optimal locations to meet community needs. Strategic planning enables a ‘dig once’ approach to upgrading the network to support EVs, delivering investment at the lowest overall cost. We are developing this pathfinder approach further with Norwich and Redbridge by incorporating feedback from resident surveys on barriers to EV uptake and predicted charging behaviours.

Cost was identified as a barrier for some and we launched a tender in Cambridge using Green Recovery Funding to fully offset connection costs. We are also launching competitions to reveal what level of discount on connection costs is needed to incentivise investment in public charging blackspots. Given the progressive nature of this initiative and its pressure on current regulations, we worked with Ofgem through the regulatory sandbox to align regulation to need. Testing of both approaches is underway to evaluate which is the most effective way to ensure customers without off-street charging are not left behind.

From this initial learning, we will use a community-based approach with other local authorities and DNOs through Green Recovery investments, and share learnings with community energy groups, BEIS and OZEV to stimulate greater public charging provision for those without access to off-street parking.

For more information visit the project’s webpage.

Councillor Kevin Maguire, cabinet member for safe and sustainable city environment at Norwich City Council, said: “The Charge Collective project will help our city to identify barriers to EV take-up especially in areas of high density housing. It’s important that the electrification of transport is socially inclusive and benefits all sectors of society”.

Norfolk County Council’s two key portfolio leads for the Environment and Transport, Cllr Andy Grant, cabinet member for environment and waste, and Cllr Martin Wilby, cabinet member for highways, infrastructure and transport, said in a joint statement: “As we move towards a low carbon future, cleaner transport has an important role to play. Building on successful work by Transport for Norwich which has seen cycle use increase by 40% in recent years and the introduction of e-scooters, electric vehicles will be a key part of our strategy in the years ahead. This project seeks to enable and encourage providers to invest in Norfolk, which is crucial if we are to have the charging network we need to support a greener economic future.”

The wide scale roll-out of high powered EV charging infrastructure is essential to accelerate the electrification of the transportation sector. Furthermore, we must give existing and future owners of EVs confidence that they will have access to high powered chargepoints (150 – 350 kW) in a similar manner to how you can stop at a petrol station for conventional vehicles.

Motorway service areas (MSAs) and service areas in major A-roads have been identified as a specific area in which the roll-out of high powered EV charging infrastructure will be important to build range confidence in consumers.

Most of the small/medium sized sites are currently connected to the 11kV or LV network with typically no 33kV network near-by. A significant amount of network reinforcements would be required on these sites in order to power high powered chargepoints. This would be expensive, time consuming and take up a large amount of space in areas where space is already limited.

Project Voyage is developing and trialling a standardised substation that can be delivered in kit form which is compact, lower in cost and faster in delivery to support the nation-wide mass rollout at small/medium sized MSA sites and service areas on major A-roads. The scalable design allows locations to add capacity in 1.5 MVA blocks to match growing demand or to accommodate multiple CPOs (Charge Point Operators). Lowering upfront investment whilst providing flexibility to expand, if proven successful, the compact substation will be made available to the market for rapid deployment.
The new substation design which fits within a single parking space and can be delivered and deployed to the charging site 2 weeks faster, takes 20-50% less space that traditional solutions and will improve access to charge points across the UK.

In order to model the uncertainties in the pathway to a Net Zero economy, UK Power Networks engaged Element Energy to develop a set of Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) describing the evolution of demand and generation across UK Power Networks’ licence areas out to 2050. The scenarios produced seek to encompass the range of potential outcomes for a broad range of the key drivers of demand and generation on the networks over the period. As part of the Open Networks Project all DNOs agreed to standardise their DFES on a single set of scenario frameworks based on the National Grid ESO Future Energy Scenarios. A key benefit of this was it ensured that all companies were presenting the information in a common framework for stakeholders. The DFES published in December 2020 was the first to be based on this agreed framework.

One of the key features of the DFES is that the forecasts are regionally specific. This is important as many local authorities and county councils are declaring climate emergencies and implementing their own Net Zero dates, in many cases earlier than the national 2050 target. Having geographically specific forecasts allows regional bodies to have a set of forecasts that are relevant to their local area. These can then be used to inform climate action plans and local policy decisions. In addition, having these regionally specific forecasts allows us to reflect local factors and include them in our forecasts.
Read the summary of our DFES 2024 report to find out more.

We have 133 Local Authorities across our three licence areas that we are engaging with alongside other utilities to better understand their Net Zero plans. Within our Distribution System Operator (DSO), our Local Net Zero team develops collaborative relationships with regional governmental bodies, including Local Authorities, County Councils and London Boroughs. We support them in creating well justified energy plans and have developed a new methodology to allow local insights to shape our network investment recommendations.

Our collaboration with local authorities includes close conversations through our annual Regional Engagement sessions. To further strengthen our collaboration, we are creating new tools and exploring new processes designed in partnership with local authorities to make sharing local plans easier and more efficient at all stages of local energy planning.

These include:

• The LAEP open data page provides easy access to over 160 datasets prioritised by local authorities to support decarbonisation plans.
• The DFES Widget allows local authorities to share their high-level decarbonisation plan.
• Your Local Net Zero Hub is the first digital tool to be designed in partnership with local authorities and is open to all local authorities across UK Power Networks’ entire licence area. The digital tool enables local authorities to combine their decarbonisation strategies, local market trends, transport plans and social inclusion policies with network infrastructure data to develop options for their communities.
• A Data Dictionary allows sharing spatially mapped, detailed LCT uptake forecasts, as might be found in a Local Area Energy Plan.

Overall, our engagement and cooperation is mapped out across various steps of the Network Options process. Hence, these tools assist Local Authorities that are at different stages of their journey to identify options and make informed recommendations on the preferred decarbonisation pathway for their local area. Ultimately, this enables us to facilitate local decarbonisation, while saving money for our customers. Energy Systems Catapult estimates that a Net Zero approach that is locally planned and coordinated with electricity networks could save £252 billion between 2025 and 2050.

Heat is the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. 95% of stakeholders at our Local Authorities Forum agreed that off-gas grid customers should be the most likely early adopters of low carbon heating. Engagement with regional gas network operators validated that electrification is the clear pathway for off-gas grid customers, leading us to focus on supporting heat decarbonisation in these communities. Transitioning an entire community in an efficient and coordinated way is complex, so last year we set out to develop the UK’s first nationally replicable blueprint for off-gas grid communities to follow, collaborating with partners in Barcombe, an off-gas grid village in East Sussex.

• We built an innovative ‘digital twin’ of the local energy network to model the effects of different heat decarbonisation pathways. Working with Community Energy South, Buro Happold and Lewes Council, we engaged with over 600 (85%) individual households and businesses in Barcombe to understand their circumstances before evaluating the benefits of a locally coordinated transition. We then modelled the impact of this coordinated approach against uncoordinated action to compare the costs, energy efficiency implications, disruption and carbon impact. We shared this model with the community so they could visualise how changes to their property could contribute to the overall community decarbonisation plan.
• We developed individual decarbonisation action plans for 150 homes and for five building archetypes which could be scaled to 550 local homes. By engaging with 150 households, Community Energy South and Ovesco, we were able to develop these personalised plans and devise common plans for five building types that cover all homes in Barcombe and are scalable for other communities to use. This coordinated approach has made the work more feasible for LCT installers, accelerating the village’s transition and since engaging in the project, Lewes District Council is now looking to decarbonise the rest of its housing stock.
• Disseminated our learnings through a combination of events, including personalising the story of Barcombe customers. We shared our learnings with heat supply chain stakeholders and other networks at a showcase event, with first-hand accounts from customers in Barcombe, and raised awareness further through a BBC feature. To accelerate and scale up progress, we co-developed a blueprint document to support other local authorities, community energy groups and off-gas grid communities to decarbonise their heating. We are now working with community clusters to test the methodology at scale and develop the step-by-step toolkit to support our transition approach.

The outcome of this project will deliver deliver £88m net customer savings when scaled to 242,000 (71%) of our off-gas grid customers – a £456m lower cost option than a gas alternative – and accelerate the pace of decarbonisation by 13 years.

To deliver Net Zero at the lowest cost to customers, UK Power Networks is looking at ways to incentivise customers to shift their energy use when it is cheaper and greener to do so. Through our project Shift, we have gained a better understanding of consumer behaviour to design attractive flexibility products to maximise participation and value.

We partnered with forward thinking energy companies to develop and run UK-first trials of a range of smart charging products, with over 2,000 EV owners in control of how they respond to financial incentives. Through the trials and our customer surveys, we found that most EV drivers smart charge majority of the time, while 7.5% of customers manually started a charging session more often than they smart charged. This insight validates that customers want to stay in control of their EV charging and allows us to factor this real-world behaviour into our network planning.

We worked with our partners to identify which aspects of customer behaviour can be influenced through proposition design. Octopus Energy’s customer survey found 83% of customers responded to tariff signals by moving the demand of other devices alongside their EV, such as dishwashers and washing machines. This insight will help us develop products that optimise existing network capacity, minimising cost and customer disruption.

Greg Jackson, CEO and founder of Octopus Energy said: “Sales of electric cars have increased 10-fold in the last five years because they are simply better than diesel and petrol. Whilst they are still a minority of cars on the road, many people say that their next car will be their first electric or their last fossil fuel. Meeting the demand for all this extra electricity will be cheapest if we use our existing infrastructure to the max. Smart charging – filling cars with renewable electrons at times when the network is under-utilised – will help make green driving cheap driving. Crucially, it reduces costs for everyone by getting more out of the system.”

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology offers tremendous potential to integrate more low-carbon technologies onto the network and help manage the forecasted growth of electricity demand in the UK. We forecast up to 500,000 V2G charge points on our network alone by 2030, and UK Power Networks is leading the way in demonstrating this technology through the TransPower project.

Running until July 2022, TransPower investigates the network impact of V2G and develops vital learnings about how we can cultivate a market to harness this emerging technology. Through the project, we are partnering with vehicle manufacturers, energy suppliers, technology providers, and academics to design and test V2G with domestic customers, electric buses, and commercial fleets.

As part of TransPower, we are involved in the following trials, covering different segments of the EV market:

• Bus2Grid: Supporting a project to turn a 28-bus garage into the first of its kind in the UK V2G bus garage.
• E4Future: A V2G trial with commercial fleet vehicles operating on a back-to-base charging model.
• Powerloop: Domestic V2G trial involving 135 customers across our electricity network.
• V2Street: Public charging networks with a local authority and a charge point provider, targeted at the 60-70% of Londoners without off-street charging capability.

UK-wide installers informed us that the application process for small-scale V2G installations, which requires multiple application forms, is too complex and presents a barrier to uptake. By working with the Energy Networks Association and companies such as Octopus Electric Vehicles and Nuvve, we led the creation and testing of a simpler and faster UK-wide application process to facilitate this rapidly emerging technology.

Over the past years, we have observed growing interest in V2G from domestic consumers, stimulated by increased coverage of V2G in the media, including an episode of Fully Charged Plus on Powerloop. Customer appetite for more dynamic V2G products and insights into real-world customer behavior from Shift are informing the development of new V2G services for domestic consumers in ongoing trials with Octopus EV.

To enable stakeholders around the globe to keep abreast of the latest trends and learnings from V2G projects, we partnered with Government funding body Innovate UK to develop the V2G Hub. This platform disseminates data across the industry, showcasing 135 pioneering V2G projects across 17 countries for a total of over 6,000 chargers.

We recognise the path to Net Zero is not straightforward. Our focus will always be to target emissions reductions first, but at some point, we will need to offset the remaining difficult-to-remove emissions. Expert stakeholders told us to start preparing for offsetting now, before demand for verified schemes grows in the coming years. They encouraged us to start building relationships and identifying the types of offsets we could use and the additional benefits that could be realised such as from nature, technology, and community-based solutions.

We explored partnerships with Wildlife Trusts and Natural England to identify how we could create synergies between our regional biodiversity programmes and wider initiatives in the community. We found these organisations are very interested in collaborating on local, nature-based solutions that improve biodiversity potential while offering potential future pathways to offsetting.

Enhanced biodiversity alongside our tree-cutting activities. A Wildlife Trust in our eastern region taught us about the potential of re-using dead wood and creating dense thickets to support local wildlife following tree-cutting. We are changing our procurement contracts to embed this practice into our business-as-usual operations. We are exploring how to develop ‘wildlife corridors’ that create proportionally greater biodiversity benefits than isolated sites by combining our data with Wildlife Trusts and Natural England priority sites. This will guide us to identify the next 100 sites we prioritise for biodiversity enhancements, allowing us to maximise environmental benefits through collaboration.

The V2BUILD initiative by UK Power Networks focuses on exploring the potential for electric vehicles (EVs) to provide two-way flexibility to buildings and the grid. This initiative aims to offer additional capacity quickly and at a lower cost, facilitating faster and more efficient electrification of buildings. By engaging with property owners, managers, occupiers, and advisors, UK Power Networks is addressing the technical, commercial, and practical issues related to this initiative. The engagement also includes testing the appetite for a building planning tool that would streamline the integration of EVs and other low-carbon technologies into existing infrastructure.

The V2BUILD initiative has produced several significant outcomes:

1. Time and Cost Savings: The self-serve site planning tool has drastically reduced the time for fleet managers to assess electrification options, cutting the process down from 25 days to under four hours, a 99% time saving.
2. Enhanced Efficiency: The initiative has avoided the need for 15 full-time equivalent (FTE) front-end processing resources while handling seven times more applications compared to 2021.
3. Improved Approval Rates: There has been a 10% increase in auto-approval rates for applications between 2021/22 and 2022/23, with 79% of domestic low-carbon technology applications auto-approved in Q4 2022/23.
4. Social and Environmental Value: Enhancements to the self-service portal have delivered £6.70 in social value for every £1 spent, driven by resource and time savings. The site planning tool is forecast to deliver £5.39 in social value for every £1 spent over the next five years, largely due to avoided reinforcement costs and societal benefits from reduced carbon emissions and improved air quality.
5. Customer Satisfaction: The initiative achieved a 96.6 customer satisfaction score for low-carbon technology supply upgrades, leading the UK.
6. Increased Capacity: The initiative unlocked local capacity for up to 1,400 additional EV chargers through Green Recovery funding, representing a 176% increase on current volumes.

Socially Green is a detailed project that will assess the needs of our current and future customers who may be disadvantaged or in vulnerable circumstances. This understanding will help us set new priorities and trackable targets aimed at creating a fair and accessible energy system for all. The project will help us identify any barriers that might exist for certain types of customers. With that understanding, we will design and evaluate new services and/or partnerships that could improve inclusion. The aim is to identify new services and trial innovative solutions designed to help those who may be disadvantaged.

Socially Green is a project that sought to better understand the needs of disadvantaged and vulnerable customers in order to provide effective support through the Net Zero Transition. Earlier phases of the project categorised disadvantaged customers into segments, identifying what is driving customers towards exclusion and developing a tool to identify the volumes & geographic spread of those segments. The recently concluded third phase comprised of two trials that aimed to identify causes and potential solutions to barriers of hard-to-reach consumers engaging in energy flexibility.

The summer trial targeted a breadth of support by attempting to financially incentivise flexibility service providers to engage hard-to-reach customers for flexibility. The summer trial mechanism has potential to be integrated into BAU tenders with minimal changes, within opportunities for growth tied to greater promotion and awareness. A total of 5,933 PSR customers participated in the winter flexibility tender before any targeted incentives to FSPs, demonstrating that several more can be engaged if FSPs are incentivised.

The autumn trial focused on depth by being the first of its kind to procure flexibility from hard-to-reach social housing tenants by working with Camden Council, a social housing provider with a housing block consisting of 58 dwellings that were undergoing energy efficiency upgrades. Project partners worked with the council to provide additional smaller energy efficiency measures and energy efficiency advice and capture the potential benefits these measures could bring to the households in reducing their overall energy usage. The autumn trial demonstrated the potential for Sustain flexibility to be attained from energy efficiency measures, a first for UKPN. The Autumn trial resulted in a positive NPV of £14,357.08 total social benefit, an SROI of £3.29 and an NPV per household of £312.11.

The learnings from these trials have given us further insight into barriers and potential solutions that our customers face when engaging with flexibility, and what could cause them to be at risk of being left behind in the Net Zero transition. A direct outcome from the autumn is the Flex Direct SIF Discovery project, which further explored the potential for Local Authorities to operate as energy efficiency flexibility aggregators.

This understanding will help us set new priorities and trackable targets aimed at creating a fair and accessible energy system for all. The project will help us identify any barriers that might exist for certain types of customers. With that understanding, we will design and evaluate new services and/or partnerships that could improve inclusion. The aim is to identify new services and trial innovative solutions designed to help those who may be disadvantaged.

Power Protect is the first project that we are aware of that looks to improve the experience of customers who are medically dependent on electricity and experiencing power cuts. Whilst a simple idea to comprehend, it is a significant undertaking to build a process that ensures the right customers are identified and supported. Over 2023/24 we trialled the deployment of portable batteries for customers to power their medical equipment through our innovation project Power Protect. 75% of customers who took part in the trial rated the service 10/10 and our learnings have been incorporated into the service to further improve the offering for our customers.

We are now the first DNO to have a dedicated process and to be offering battery packs to all medically dependent customers across our network to support their needs during power cuts that last longer than four hours as part of our PSR.

Our new The Low Carbon Technology (LCT) Forum serves as an engagement platform to understand the needs of diverse customers looking to decarbonise their estates. This includes organisations such as the NHS, prisons, Ministry of Defence, and ports, which previously did not require significant interaction with the network. Through the forum, representatives from various sectors collaborate to develop insights, raise awareness of available support, and identify additional support needs. The key outcomes include building relationships with the property sector to support whole-building electrification at lower costs and addressing complex issues related to multi-occupancy buildings and fair allocation of capacity. The forum’s initiatives help overcome barriers to electrification, ensuring that customers can efficiently transition to low-carbon technologies.

HV Autoquote is a nationally significant trial that could revolutionise the customer experience for HV connection requests by developing an online self-serve tool for formal connection offers that will reduce the time to quote from weeks to minutes.
Providing formal connection offers to customers for new HV connections requires UK Power Networks to undertake several manual activities which can take weeks to complete. This process is slow, labour intensive and ultimately the connection offer may not be accepted by the customer. Customers are also often dissatisfied with the process as there is a lack of visibility for how the costs are calculated and the network constraints.

The number of connection requests are expected to grow by at least 40% by 2028 and using current processes, this would require a significant increase in work to maintain the same performance and level of customer service.

This project will deliver an online externally available self-serve tool to provide high voltage connection offers to UK Power Networks’ customers. Customers will be able to drop an asset on a map and draw a connection. To do so requires detailed discovery and documentation of the current manual processes, underlying data and costing logic. The processes and data will then be codified for the online tool and tested against manually generated connection offers. The tool will then be built, integrated with UK Power Networks existing systems and processes, and tested with customers in live trials post implementation.

HV Autoquote aims to improve the customer service for HV connection requests by working with software providers EA Technology to develop an online self-serve tool for formal connection offers (between 300 kVA – 1 MVA) and budget estimates (1 MVA – 2.5 MVA) that will reduce the time to quote from weeks to minutes and enable a larger volume of quotes to be delivered to customers.

Local authorities we serve have asked for support with their Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) applications. With competition for funding, limited time and budget, local authorities have to ensure their bids are as strong as possible to secure vital funding – both in in planning and delivery – to deliver for customers and keep on track with broader climate targets

The key objectives of the projects are:

1. Support LEVI Tranche 2 Local authorities by ensuring their bids and applications are as strong and as well evidenced as possible.
2. Save local authorities time in preparing and submitting their applications for funding with deliverables specifically designed for LEVI bid work.
3. Evaluate locations for public charging in collaboration with all stakeholders to ensure the right chargers are placed in the right location at the right time
4. Enable forecasting to be as accurate as possible, through the provision of hyper granular demand datasets

Working with CENEX and ZapMap, UKPN will combine hypergranular data with market expertise with our cabling data to help local authorities get more for their money and increase the quality of their applications.

We have compared and contrasted the resilience preparedness plans with industry peers and non-energy companies, lead UK Government Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC); UK energy sector groups such as the Electricity Networks Association (ENA) and The Energy Emergencies Executive Cyber Committee (E3CC), Chair the General Electric (GE) Security Forum.
UK Power Networks has collaborated with leading network and security providers such as Cisco, to design the IP network of the future digital substation, and FortiNet who provided key industry information to enhance the design, specification and manufacture of industrial network switches that meet IEC61850 standards.

UK Power Networks operates a “not if, but when” mindset to cyber resilience and regularly runs cyber crisis simulations and penetration testing facilitated by external cyber specialist partners. This exercising includes key members of the Incident Leadership Team and has representation across all key business functions to build the muscle memory across the organisation. The scenarios test how ready the business is to respond to realistic and serious cyber-attacks in a safe environment, such as a ransomware infection or website defacement. Scenario are developed form current threat information and bring together situations based on real life events to simulate a cyber-attack. At each stage, the team are to consider how they would react to those circumstances, what potential issues could arise and what practical steps the team would take. Lessons learnt and remedial actions are generated from all levels of exercising to ensure maturity in incident response and incident management.

The Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla took place at Westminster Abbey on Saturday 6 May 2023. This was a major event for the United Kingdom with global media coverage and UKPN was fundamental in ensuring it was successful. Given that the location was within our area, UKPN invoked Major Event Planning procedures covering operations, safety and security. The Coronation weekend suffered no IT disruption or cyber incidents.

UKPN is currently investing heavily in cyber security resilience, protection and governance. A major program of works is ongoing heavily focused on meeting any future cyber security requirements and embedding security best practice into all aspects of UKPN network operations. With all cyber security teams investing in additional staff, training and new tooling to ensure that the network and operations are fit for purpose well into the future and provide the required level of maturity to meet enhanced regulatory requirements. With an ambitious plan to uplift capabilities and teams by the end of 2025.

This will mean a significant and intense program of work to push to become a leading cyber security function in the sector not just domestically but internationally.

It’s not considered that digitalisation is a simple continuation of traditional IT investments. Nor is it something that is compelled to engage with because it is the latest technological advancement. UKPN recognise that digitalisation is driving significant change across the sector that we need to both respond to and embrace in order to deliver against our customer’s expectations and needs, and to ensure successful delivery of our RIIO-ED2 business plan and commitments.

For example, a major component of our business plan is to avoid increased costs to customers by making smarter investments in the network at the right time. Although within our DSO strategy we address using flexibility to avoid major investments in network infrastructure, the digital investments we make here are fundamental in providing the enabling information technology and data capabilities.

Another example is the commitment by Customer Service Strategy, where four pillars are set out to support customers during the funding period, and the ambition to deliver an even better service in RIIO-ED2. Ultimately, there is a choice – UKPN can deliver this improved service through increased resources and therefore higher costs, or a smarter delivery through targeted investments based on engagement and feedback can be executed. This strategy has been devised to enable the latter.
There is consciousness that digitalisation plans are often highly ambitious but defined at a high level and lacking in substance. The aspiration for the plan is to be different – ambitious but practical – with sufficient detail to ensure its credibility.

The plan has been built from the ground-up via a combination of extensive customer and stakeholder engagements, elicitation of knowledge from our staff, evaluation and analysis of our current digital landscape and support from leading digital experts. It is underpinned by a drive to provide the highest levels of customer satisfaction by meeting then beating their expectations. The plan is purposeful and led by the objective of addressing real stakeholder needs – we will only digitalise where it provides value, efficiency and security.

You can find additional information about our business plan on our website.