Unblocking Networks: Local Optimisation, Consumers and Knowledge (UN:LOCK) was awarded funding through Round 3 of Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and is being delivered by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, Regen and Environmental Project Support.
Project duration: March 2024 – May 2024
Project leads: Tamar Bourne, Head of Smart Energy, and Ellie Brundrett, Net Zero Project Manager
The Isle of Wight has a significant resource for renewable energy generation and has made good progress in deploying assets, currently dominated by solar power generation. However, there is a limit to how much of this renewable electricity can be connected to the network due to the available capacity of the cables that connect the Isle of Wight to the mainland. The island’s electricity network has been constrained on generation for 10 years making it difficult for new generators to connect on a non-curtailable basis. In 2022 Regen was commissioned to undertake a detailed, accurate review of planned and aspirational growth of electricity demand, generation and storage across the Isle of Wight. There was consensus that the Isle of Wight is a good place to develop renewables and that grid constraints are preventing strong projects in a supportive local authority area from coming forward.
While there is now a focus on installing an additional subsea cable to increase the available capacity, this could take 6-10 years to achieve due to planning, consenting and construction requirements. Project UN:LOCK is looking at ways in which the connection of new generation can be accelerated ahead of this network reinforcement. It is exploring opportunities to reliably increase on-island demand at the appropriate times to create additional capacity on the network and looking at using novel commercial arrangements, data and digital tools to maximise network capacity and enable the accelerated connection of generation. We spoke to a wide range of stakeholders with interest in developing renewable energy projects, as well as other key organisations interested in driving forward the net zero ambitions on the island, to discuss the emerging options in detail.
Regen supported National Grid Electricity Distribution to understand the priorities of National Grid’s customers and the potential market for the innovative Take Charge substation design.
Project duration: December 2023 – March 2024
National Grid Electricity Distribution recently undertook a successful innovation project ‘Take Charge’, designing and installing a compact primary substation at Exeter Services to support Moto Services’ EV charging requirements. In the long term, there is the potential for standardised, modular and compact primary substations to deliver large amounts of capacity from the distribution networks.
In support of this work, Regen carried out a select number of interviews on behalf of National Grid to understand the priorities of National Grid’s customers and the potential market for new substation designs. This customer engagement, building on Regen’s ongoing work to deliver National Grid’s Distribution Future Energy Scenarios, is supporting a wider project focused on rolling out and commercialising the innovative Take Charge substation.
We explored EV charging, heat networks, data centres and maritime decarbonisation, sharing the results of the work with National Grid in the form of an independent report.
In partnership with Innovate UK, Regen has developed the Playbook for Network Innovation to support projects throughout their journey and provide recommendations to shape the UK energy innovation landscape.
Project manager: Grace Millman
Project duration: July 2023 – March 2024
Network innovation funding has enabled improvements in efficiency, safety, customer service and resilience. We have seen some big steps forward, such as the testing and roll-out of active network management and flexibility markets. However, a more radical step change is required if we are to meet the net zero challenge.
The innovation landscape has also undergone a significant transformation in the last few years, with new price control periods and changing innovation funding.
Ofgem and Innovate UK are collaborating on the new Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), which replaces the Network Innovation Competition (NIC) in the second RIIO price control period. With £450 million available over a five-year period, the vision for the SIF is to enable a ‘giant leap together’ in network innovation, helping to deliver net zero at the lowest cost to consumers by enabling strategic change. Working with other public funders of innovation, the SIF aims to deliver real net benefits to network companies, energy users and consumers, and help the UK become a global hub of energy innovation; a ‘Silicon Valley’ of energy.
Regen’s experience of working with the energy networks and innovators is that they face a number of challenges. This project has conducted a deep dive into previous projects to look for trends related to success and failure. This included looking at when useful learning was generated from the project, whether the innovation was rolled out into business-as-usual and whether a product or service was successfully commercialised.
This has been combined with existing academic research on innovation diffusion to identify targeted recommendations to the innovation community to increase the chances of successful deployment of future innovation projects. By harnessing these invaluable insights, we want to create a powerful resource that will guide innovators, energy networks and their partners as they develop and refine their ideas, craft project applications and embark on their journey of network innovation and successful deployment.
For more information, please reach out to the project lead, Grace Millman, or Regen’s head of innovation, Tamar Bourne.
The PRIDE project aims to improve how local planning and network investment decisions are made to fast-track the infrastructure and low-carbon technology deployment at a regional level to deliver net zero.
Project duration: October 2023 – March 2024
Project lead: Mollie Atherton
Planning Regional Infrastructure in a Digital Environment, or PRIDE, is a Strategic Innovation Fund project being run by a consortium of partners including Regen, the West Midlands Combined Authority, Advanced Infrastructure, National Grid Electricity Distribution and National Grid ESO.
Exploring new digital planning tools, governance and processes, the PRIDE project aims to improve how local planning and network investment decisions are made to fast-track the infrastructure and low-carbon technology deployment at a regional level to deliver net zero.
The PRIDE project is at the Alpha stage of the SIF process. In this stage it will be exploring three key elements:
The project follows on from the Discovery phase, in which Regen supported the West Midlands Combined Authority to engage with local authorities about how a digital planning tool could help improve local energy planning processes and what data and functionality they would like to see in such a tool. The Alpha phase will run from October 2023 until March 2024, at which point Regen and the consortium partners will submit a bid for the final Beta phase to continue to explore the governance system and how learnings can contribute to the development of the RESP.
For further information on the project, please contact Mollie Atherton.
Regen have been supporting the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) with its Planning Regional Infrastructure in a Digital Environment (PRIDE) project.
Project duration: May– June 2023
Project lead: Mollie Atherton
PRIDE is a collaborative project between the WMCA, National Grid Electricity Distribution and Advanced Infrastructure. Its goal is to improve how local planning decisions can influence network investment to accelerate the deployment of low carbon technologies and decarbonise heat and transport.
This project explored how a whole systems digital planning tool could help local authorities develop flexible and lower cost local area energy plans, and a governance structure that would ensure those local area energy plans are embedded into network investment decisions.
In our role, we delivered an in-person workshop and online webinar with the local authorities in the West Midlands Combined Authority region that explored:
· The opportunities and challenges of local area energy planning.
· How the whole systems digital planning tool could help local authorities develop local area energy plans.
· Governance structures that provide a platform for better engagement between local authorities and energy networks.
It was important to us that local and regional needs were being considered throughout the project. We designed the workshops to provide a platform on which local authorities can share their challenges with project partners as well as other local authorities to encourage peer-to-peer learning and support.
This project formed part of the Discovery phase of PRIDE, which finished in June 2023. We have supported the project partners submit the SIF funding bid for the next phase of the PRIDE project, during which we will join the consortium as a project partner and help continue to support the development of the whole systems planning tool and trial the governance structures with local authorities and infrastructure providers in the WMCA region.
For further information on the project, please contact Mollie Atherton.
Project duration: November 2021 to March 2022
Regen was commissioned by ENA to revise and refresh the strategy to ensure that network innovation continues to be coordinated, focused on the key priorities for the energy system and delivers benefits to energy consumers.
The innovation landscape has evolved since the network innovation strategies were last published in 2020 and so have the priorities and views of energy network stakeholders. With the input and feedback of a diverse group of stakeholders, we’ve ensured that the underlying principles, themes and focus areas that guide network innovation continue to tackle our biggest challenges for 2022 and beyond. Stakeholder feedback has shaped every section of this strategy and we thank all those who were involved throughout.
The aim of the strategy is to enable stakeholders to understand the key priorities for network innovation and how to get involved. You’ll find this information, and lots more, in the strategy and you can also explore these concepts by navigating the interactive infographics below.
You can read the full 2022 Energy Networks Innovation Strategy by clicking the image below.
Stakeholder engagement:
The development of the 2022 Energy Networks Innovation Strategy was underpinned by an extensive stakeholder engagement process, and we thank everyone who gave their time and thoughts to help shape the future of network innovation.
We first invited stakeholder views with the launch of an online consultation and associated webinar where we asked for feedback on the proposed updates to the principles and themes governing network innovation for 2022. We heard from 138 of you and at least 80% of you agreed with our proposed revisions to each of the innovation themes. The online consultation summary report can be read here.
View the slides from the webinar here. The recording from the webinar can be watched below.
We then ran two workshops in early 2022, attended by 199 stakeholders, to explore in detail the key focus areas sitting underneath the themes. These focus areas are intended to help innovators better understand how they can collaborate on network innovation projects by clearly laying out the priorities within each theme. The workshop summary report can be read here.
Within the strategy, we’ve included a high-level guide which maps out the key stages involved in delivering an innovation project from start to finish. We hope this will help the innovation community better understand how to collaborate with the networks to solve some of the biggest challenges faced by the industry.
Regen was delighted to attend the Energy Innovation Summit on 28-29 September 2022, having worked on the content for the event. Previously known as the Energy Networks Innovation Conference (ENIC), this year’s event has been rebranded to The Summit as part of a new collaboration with BEIS, Innovate UK, Ofgem and Regen, opening the UK’s leading energy innovation event up to wider industry as well as attracting new domestic and international delegates. You can watch the livestreamed sessions here.
Project duration: June 2017 to April 2020
Regen was one of the partners on OpenLV, a network innovation trial with Western Power Distribution (WPD) which gave communities and businesses access to local electricity substation data. The project trialled an open software platform in electricity substations that monitored substation performance and electricity demand for a local area, and hosted apps that enabled participants to access this data and explore uses for it which benefited communities and the network.
The software was installed in 80 Low Voltage (LV) distribution substations across WPD’s licence areas, and could ultimately be deployed in every LV and High Voltage (HV) substation in Great Britain.
Regen worked alongside the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to support the eight community groups involved in the trial, and evaluate how useful the local electricity data was for them. For more on how communities used the data, you can read the OpenLV guidebook for community energy organisations, ‘Using data from your local substation’, with case studies on trial participants, along with more information and resources from the project.
This video sets out some of the ways open access to local electricity substation data can help to support people in fuel poverty and vulnerable customers as we transition to a smarter, decarbonised network.
OpenLV was a Western Power Distribution project, funded by the Network Innovation Competition, and delivered by EA Technology.
To find out more about the Open LV project, contact Ky Hoare at khoare@regen.co.uk.
Project duration: July – September 2020
Regen worked with UK Research and Innovation and Energy Systems Catapult to explore how open data can enable greater innovation in local energy systems.
We explored the opportunities for using data for local energy systems and identified the challenges that stakeholders had that could be met through data solutions. In doing so we hoped to support innovation for net zero and investment in the green recovery.
Some of the ways in which data could be better used are:
But we knew there are many more use cases out there. So, we asked stakeholders for their views through an online survey and two workshops. The findings are reflected in the final outputs, available here.
The key findings were shared at the ISCF Modernising Energy Data Competition briefing on 22 September, hosted by UK Research and Innovation, the recording of which can be found below
The purpose of this exercise was to help stimulate innovation to provide real-world solutions to the challenges we are facing. UK Research and Innovation has launched a competition to support exactly that with up to £150k for a feasibility study in the first phase. You can find out more about the competition here.
Project duration: October 2014 to February 2017
Regen worked with Western Power Distribution (WPD), Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network (WREN) and Tempus Energy to trial a Sunshine Tariff in Wadebridge, Cornwall.
The trial looked to understand how different customers engage with a cheaper daytime tariff and how active they become in changing their consumption patterns in response to this price signal. The project aimed to resolve network capacity issues in the local area by incentivising customers to use electricity between 10am and 4pm in the summer months, which is often when solar generation is at its greatest.
The findings from the trial are set out in a number of reports (click to download):
And you can listen to the team talk about the trial in the Sunshine Tariff webinar. Please note that there is no sound for the first one and a half minutes.
The team were not able to answer all the questions during the webinar, so a Frequently Asked Questions document was compiled.
Project lead: Tamar Bourne
Contact: tbourne@regen.co.uk
