Opening up distribution system operations

Utility Week speaks to Paul Jewell, DSO development manager for Western Power Distribution (WPD), about its new two-pronged distribution system operator (DSO) strategy that is split between services that could be provided by either itself or a third party and “system enablers” that will be required by both.  

While Ofgem once spoke about distribution network operators (DNOs) “becoming distribution system operators,” the regulator now talks about “providing distribution system operations,” staking out the possibility that these capabilities could be provided by some outside party, says Jewell.

“We’ve tried to put ourselves in that position of the third-party operator,” he explains. “If you were outside looking into WPD, what would you need? And there’s a whole bunch of stuff which you need from us, which we call the enablers, and then there’s a whole bunch of stuff which you create for yourself, if being a DSO provider is your line of business.”

“We probably need to wave a flag for WPD and say in our view we think we’re well placed to offer that DSO service,” he qualifies. “We know what we’re doing, we’ve got a track record et cetera. But it does appear to be an area where Ofgem are looking for maybe a bit more competition, maybe a bit more interaction with other parties.”

Jewell says this change in language is reflected in WPD’s new DSO strategy which is split between services that could be provided by either itself or a third party and “system enablers” that will be required by both.

He says: “The DNO enablers are things that we would need to offer equitably and independently to whatever DSO company came along. That’s access to our data, access to our systems, ability to talk our control room and get access to things that they’ve got.”

As part of its efforts to open up access to data, WPD has created a portal on its website.

“If you go back a few years, it was quite difficult to get data out of WPD,” Jewell admits. “Before the start of ED1 you probably couldn’t get much data from us at all. And we started making that data available in relatively small ways and a lot of it we made available through password protected systems and log-ons.

“But through ED1 most of our stakeholders have said why are you doing that. And what they were also saying was I don’t want to download it. I want to access it live and in real-time.

He continues: “We’re now in a position where you can download models of the power network in the CIM [Common Information Model] format – that’s the international standard for electricity networks – from the website without registering. You can just go on and press download.

“And there’s a lot more stuff where we either offer the background data direct to people or we offer an API [application programming interface] so that they can be fed data because it’s quite clear that’s what people are going to need.”

He draws a comparison with the opening up of data within the rail industry: “It’s a bit like the last review into railways, which showed that a lot of rail network capacity had been opened up because of API links to apps like Trainline.com.

“I’m an engineer so I would have been looking for tracks, points, signals, platforms but what they said was that if you give that data out to your customers then they will find the best time to travel, they will find the most efficient time to travel, and suddenly the network capacity is increased because there’s less peaks and troughs in it.

“I can see that’s going to come in our industry as well.”

Jewell says the same approach has been applied to its Flexible Power marketplace which all other DNOs have joined with the exception of UK Power Networks: “All of the management of our flexibility providers that we signed up through Flexible Power is done an API platform and it’s a third-party platform. You don’t have to log onto a WPD thing. You don’t have to connect to our management system. There is a third-party solution which hosts that for you.”

He describes the Flexible Power project as one of WPD’s biggest successes: “The reason that is a big success for us, given that it came out of our original innovation project, is that if you’re a Marks and Spencer or a Sainsbury’s or Ikea or whatever, you’re not going to be interested in knowing the names of the six DNOs in Great Britain.

“You are going to want something that you can sign up to that spreads across your whole estate of demand-side response opportunity and it’s taken a while but I’m really pleased that we were able to do that.

“And because it’s API-driven and third-party provided, rather than direct WPD-provided, that does mean it’s been quite easy for the other network operators to link into it. It means that if you are a nationwide service provider to the DNOs, it’s only one API. Everything’s run through the same platform which is good for them. It just makes life easier for the industry rather than us rushing off in six directions and making it complicated.”

Jewell says one type of party from which they have seen growing interest is housing developers: “We’ve worked quite closely with Sero Homes in south Wales and on one of their estates they’re trying to set it up as almost a virtual power station because they have got demand and they have got generation and they’ve built all of their homes within an estate-wide control system.

“That gives the residents the chance to sign up to that, be part of it, have some of their energy usage controlled by the management system but gain a benefit from whatever can be gained from WPD’s flexibility systems or even National Grid’s systems.

“I think as more estates move to heat pumps and demands increase, developers are going to start coming to us and saying what can we do to make this estate fit on the networks rather than coming to us with a maximum demand figure for what they need to connect their estate.”

The strategy includes a checklist of progress against Ofgem’s baseline criteria for distribution system operations that must be achieved by the end of the RIIO ED2 price controls, which shows “whether we’ve already achieved it now, whether we’re going to achieve it by the end of ED2 or whether it is something that is going to happen in ED2”.

Jewell says roughly a third of the criteria fall into each of these three categories.

“That’s just a nice little takeaway for our stakeholders to firstly work out whether or not we’re aligned with what Ofgem thinks, which is the most important thing, but secondly how far down the road we are in creating the DSO environment that Ofgem are looking for.”

Jewell says one of the areas where WPD still has a lot of work to do is rolling out monitoring across its low-voltage networks: “We’ve got really good monitoring down to our primary substations but we get down to the substation at the end of your street, there’s not a huge amount of monitoring capability there. And we are going to need to know the data at that level.”

To keep down costs, WPD only wants to put monitoring equipment into substations where it is actually required: “So, our first port of call is to understand in a more granular way how our local network is working is to make use of smart meter. That’s an area where in the past 12 months we’ve started using real smart meter in anger.

“The no-supply alerts we’ve been using for quite a few years – almost ever since they became available – but we’ve now got enough smart meters on our network – something like 2 million out of our 8 million customers – that we’re starting to be able to take early steps into getting profile information for substations from that data.

“There’s a balance then to be struck between the substations that you use smart meter data for to understand what’s going on and then the one that you put your own monitoring on to get a more accurate and granular view.”

The approach to providing DSO services was a feature in the ED2 business plans of all the DNOs. UK Power Networks chief executive Basil Scarsella spoke to Utility Week last month about his company’s plans to create a “separable and independent” legal entity.