The future DNO agenda

The Utility Week Congress launches at the Hotel Russell in London on 15 and 16 October, and one of the speakers is UK Power Networks chief Basil Scarsella. He talks to Utility Week

What are the big challenges and opportunities for networks?

The climate and energy landscape.

The electricity sector will bear the brunt of delivering the UK’s “renewables” targets, and this will mean a paradigm shift for distribution networks.

The economic climate.

The economic downturn means doing “more with less” to keep consumer bills manageable while still promoting innovation when delivering services, and this is a very real challenge for UK Power Networks.

Changing customer expectations.

There is an increasing expectation from our industrial and commercial (I&C) customers that our staff are multi-skilled and our interactions with them are seamless. They expect to be able to talk through and understand our engineering limitations and, in turn, to share their commercial constraints and expect us to work with them in maximising value and speed of their connections. Customer experiences with other sectors outside of electricity distribution have raised consumer expectations and we need to meet them.

Ageing assets.

Smart grids and smart meters

Smart grid principles will need to be applied to very dense underground urban networks through to overhead rural networks.

The rollout of smart meters will change the way network operators interact with customers

What major changes do you envisage in the role of power networks?

The challenges we face require us to be better at what we already do, and to innovate in the way in which we design, build, maintain and operate the network. UK Power Networks has been refreshing its network innovation strategy to deal with these challenges.

What technologies will prove game changers?

Smart meters; electric vehicles; distributed generation; heat pumps; and storage.

The roll out of these technologies on a large scale (especially distributed generation) will require us to move from being a distribution network operator (DNO) to being a distribution system operator (DSO).

A DSO will have access to a portfolio of responsive demand, storage and controllable generation assets that can be used to actively contribute to both distribution network and wider system operation. A DSO will build and operate a flexible network with the ability to control local flows.

How do you think networks’ relationships with their customers need to change?

In the past our role was essentially to deliver electricity, while ensuring that customers could contact us for the latest information if an incident arose.

Today we are changing from DNO to DSO, in recognition of the new technology coming on board such as smart meters and time-of-use tariffs and actively controlling the flow of power into homes and businesses, and being produced by distributed generation plants. This is what will enable our customers to embrace low carbon products and ways of living.

As a result, it’s no longer a case of planning for the future by laying more cables in the ground but also considering and encompassing the introduction of smarter technologies in an efficient and flexible way, so that the electricity networks can adapt and change as customers’ demands change.

Another of our key challenges in terms of our relationships with customers has always been to listen to their feedback and meet their needs, and that will of course continue. Customers now have very different expectations of how they want to engage with us, and in the eight years from 2015 we are planning multiple improvements such as extended opening times for connections advice phone lines, bringing in more self-service facilities for people to access our services online, and offering more ways to get in touch. It’s an exciting time, and the future is constantly challenging for companies like ours, which has customer service at its heart.

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 30th August July 2013.

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