Electricity networks must evolve to keep up with the pace of change

"Central to becoming smarter and answering those questions is increasing the knowledge we have"

The pace of change in the electricity distribution industry is astonishing and nowhere is it more apparent than in my field of future networks.

Even a decade ago, the timescales we worked to were long: years in the future in many cases. Today, where possible, innovation becomes business as usual within months. No one’s yet given me a deadline of “yesterday” to find an innovation for a network demand but I suspect that might only be a matter of time.

For engineers like myself, this amount of change is exciting. Fundamentally, we’re being asked to deliver more capacity without increasing costs to customers or reducing the reliability of the network.

To put that into some sort of context, an average domestic customer with Western Power Distribution pays 27p a day for our element of their electricity bill. That’s astonishing – if you go to a supermarket what can you buy for 27p these days?

What makes that figure even more remarkable is that in real terms distribution costs have fallen since privatisation while investment in the networks has soared. To put it another way, as a percentage of their household income, customers are paying less for a more reliable service than they did before privatisation.

That’s the sort of win-win situation that we need to keep in mind as we face the engineering challenges of the 21^st Century: unprecedented distributed generation and the increasing use of low-carbon technologies.

DSO evolution

Already Western Power Distribution has moved away from the default position of building more traditional infrastructure to reinforce the network. Instead, ways of maximising what’s already in place are now an integral part of planning and development for any project. At the moment traditional infrastructure is still the answer in the majority of cases but in 10 to 20 years that might not be the case.

As a distribution network operator (DNO) we’ve always looked at the maximum capacity we need and built accordingly. It’s passive and reassuring but it’s a 20^th Century approach as we near the end of the second decade of the 21^st Century.

Evolving into a distribution system operator (DSO) enables us to be much smarter and more flexible in the way we approach managing and reinforcing the network. But it also raises a lot of new questions.

Central to becoming smarter and answering those questions is increasing the knowledge we have, which means increasing our forecasting ability. As a DNO we needed to look years into the future. As a DSO we still need to do that but we also need to be able to predict load and generation in the next half-hour.

Demand flexibility

Above all, one thing is clear: we cannot make this change in isolation. We will need the help and support of other industries: to understand what a solar farm will generate on a particular day we will need solar irradiance forecasts. To understand how we determine flexibility services requirements in operational timescales we need software.

We know there is a window of opportunity for the automotive and energy industries to work together before electric vehicles become mass market. It goes beyond ensuring that there are standard plugs that all charging points at service stations can accept. It also means understanding how, as manufacturers aspire to greater range, different battery sizes and charging rates will affect electricity networks.

One thing that has to be factored into everything we do is understanding customer behaviour. Previous projects have indicated that there is very limited interest in demand flexibility for existing appliances.

But what if this isn’t the case with new low carbon technologies? What if we can introduce demand flexibility right in the early days of customer take-up? Part of Electric Nation’s remit is to investigate what customers will find acceptable. This could be delaying vehicle charging so they avoid peak times or changing the charging rate so vehicles charge at a slower pace.

There’s also the question of automation: if customers don’t have to think about being flexible in their usage but are willing to allow us to make the decisions for them does that create more interest? In South Wales we’ve partnered with Wales and West Utilities to test domestic hybrid gas and electric heat pumps that can switch to using the most efficient fuel to heat people’s homes.

These are just some of the questions we are asking: one thing that is guaranteed is that in this era of change they won’t be the last.

Roger Hey will be speaking at the Wales Energy Conference in Cardiff in May