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
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.
Regen has been working with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) to collate evidence on the future electricity load growth on the Outer Hebrides, Inner Hebrides and Orkney. This work will help SSEN to better understand what investment is needed in the islands’ electricity networks, including the subsea cables that connect them to the mainland.
Project duration: October 2023 – February 2024
Project lead: Becky Fowell, Energy Market Analyst
Within their RIIO-ED2 business plan, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) identified the need to replace or strategically reinforce 15 subsea cables that currently connect various Scottish islands to the mainland. Funding for these cables is being explored through SSENs Hebrides and Orkney Whole System Uncertainty Mechanism (HOWSUM) programme of work, which is being assessed across 2024 and 2025.
The evidence cases for these island groups builds on Regen’s ongoing work to deliver SSEN’s annual Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) assessments for their North of Scotland licence area. They also build on a similar load growth assessment that Regen completed for the Isle of Wight, in SSEN’s Southern England licence area.
The evidence cases provide a summary of the existing electricity network and existing network constraints, alongside a summary of the potential future electricity load growth out to 2050, categorised by:
The work also provides insight into additional sources of future electricity load from industries that are not currently included within the DFES technology scope, such as:
This study is intended to support SSEN to identify future electricity needs across these Scottish Island groups. This will inform the network investment requirements to enable future uptake of renewable generation and low carbon technologies across the islands, allowing for both net zero and security of supply within the island groups.
SSEN have recently published documentations related to their HOWSUM (Hebrides and Orkney Whole System Uncertainty Mechanism) application on their website.
The evidence cases that Regen has provided for each island group can be found below.
Regen is working with Energy Networks Association to develop a report looking at how energy networks and local authorities can better collaborate on local net zero planning and delivery.
Project manager: Mollie Atherton
Exploring the various points of interaction between local authorities and energy networks, this project focuses on understanding more about the relationships, processes, technologies and innovations that enable local authorities and networks to share planning information and align local planning with network planning and investment.
The project is the starting point for ongoing work by Energy Networks Association to help drive consistency across how the networks engage with local authorities, particularly about topics like open data, strategic planning, connections and innovation.
Regen has engaged more than 30 local authorities through interviews and workshops to gather their insights about the engagement process and to understand from a local authority perspective what best practice looks like.
The report will be published in December 2023.
In 2022, Regen was commissioned by the Welsh Government to produce comprehensive evidence of Welsh energy trends to support the development of energy targets.
Regen has now delivered its evidence to the Welsh Government and the resulting consultation is now underway.
The development of challenging interim energy targets is a critical step on the road to net-zero emissions. Tracking and communicating progress against energy targets can help to shape effective policy and market responses towards our net zero commitment. Energy targets can:
As an organisation with a mission to support net zero, Regen recognises the importance of challenging energy targets. We therefore enjoyed our work with the Welsh Government to build an evidence base for the development of Welsh energy targets.
Our analysis of Wales’s in-development renewable energy projects and technical energy resources identified that Wales is well equipped to take a leading role in achieving a decarbonised energy system.
Figure 1: Example route to an illustrative 2035 target of generating the equivalent of 100% of Wales’ electricity demand from renewable electricity sources.
The Welsh Government is now consulting on its plans for future targets. Based on Regen’s evidence, the Welsh Government’s proposed targets include:
The proposed Welsh energy targets will require significant investment and collaboration between government, industry, and other stakeholders. Delivery of the targets has the potential to transform the Welsh energy sector, driving the development of technologies and infrastructure, and create opportunities for job creation and economic growth.
The Welsh Government’s consultation on their proposed energy targets is now underway, which, along with Regen’s evidence base, can be read here.
Read more about the project in the Welsh energy targets insights blog below:
Ask anyone involved in sustainable energy what the biggest challenge they face is and the chances are they will cite the grid. The Government, Ofgem, the Electricity System Operator and the Network Operators have all set out plans to deliver the investment to support net zero. But is it enough? And what really needs to happen at each level of the electricity system?
Regen is working with MCS Charitable Foundation to demystify the challenge of upgrading the grid to achieve the UK’s decarbonisation and energy security goals.
The project:
The project involves a study of existing evidence including some of Regen’s own analyses. The final output is expected to be a short briefing paper launching in May 2023.
The project team:
Project manager: Frank Hodgson
Project director: Merlin Hyman
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.
Launched 19th October 2022.
A huge expansion of offshore wind is coming – the UK is aiming to deliver 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030. To date, almost three-quarters of the UK’s 13 GW offshore wind capacity has been installed along the east coast of Great Britain. However, recent innovations in floating offshore wind have enabled the development of projects in deeper water off the west coast. This presents an opportunity for west coast offshore wind projects to address the lack of geographical diversity of the UK’s offshore wind fleet and to play a vital role in energy system balancing, energy security and price stability.
The Go West! study explores and identifies the benefits that pursuing a more geographically diverse offshore wind fleet could bring to both the UK energy system and energy consumers, and recommends the policy innovations required to deliver such a balanced fleet.
Project title: ‘Go West – An analysis of the energy system benefits and policy implications of a more geographically diverse offshore wind portfolio’
Project lead: Jack Adkins, Senior Analyst | Project duration: May – October 2022
The paper was jointly sponsored by Simply Blue Group, Magnora Offshore Wind, Morwind and Northland Power (with Regen retaining editorial independence over recommendations and conclusions) and has been informed by engagement with key energy sector stakeholders, including National Grid ESO, BEIS, Ofgem, Welsh Government, The Crown Estate, rUK and the CCC.
This paper was born of an early analysis by Regen director Johnny Gowdy of a particularly interesting weather weekend in December 2021, where low wind across the East coast resulted in several days of very low wind generation, whilst high wind resource across the West coast remained untapped that could have mitigated high wholesale price volatility and system balancing costs.
For the Go West study, Regen has modelled several possible future 70 GW offshore wind fleets with varying capacity on the west coast of Great Britain – from the ‘Stay East’ scenario with just 3GW on the west coast, to the ‘Go West!’ scenario with 35GW on the west coast to complement east coast generation.
Using 20 years of wind resource data, the report assesses potential system benefits such as reduced occurrence and duration of low offshore wind power, reduced power generation volatility, and associated potential reductions in energy system costs and carbon emissions.
For more information, please contact Jack Adkins, Senior Analyst at Regen.
Project duration: December 2021 – October 2022
To address the challenge of how a decarbonised power system could operate during challenging periods of the year, Regen worked alongside National Grid ESO’s Bridging the Gap programme to produce ‘A day in the life of 2035’. The project asks: How will a very low carbon electricity system, with a very high proportion of variable renewable energy, significant new demand from EVs and heat pumps, and much greater levels of flexibility, remain flexible enough to deal with the diverse conditions that the British weather and energy system will throw at it?
We looked at the specific pieces of the puzzle needed to achieve a decarbonised electricity system by 2035, including:
In early 2022 we published the first report illustrating how a 2035 decarbonised electricity system may operate on a challenging day in winter with high demand and low availability of renewables.
We have now published the second edition, which adds a summer’s day with significant excess renewable energy. This means finding ways of keeping the system secure and stable when demand is low and the availability of wind and solar is high. Traditionally much of the system’s stability services and its ability to respond to unexpected faults has been provided by fossil fuel generation – by 2035 we need those services, as well as our energy, to come from zero carbon sources.
Click below to view the final report
This analysis was published 13 October 2022.
This publication was launched in March 2022 alongside National Grid ESO’s Bridging the Gap programme.. The analysis has been integrated into the second edition released in October 2022. With particularly high levels of interest in the project, we hosted a Q+A session to discuss some of the assumptions and uncertainties. A recording of the session can be found here.
View the first edition of the report here
Regen is supporting Western Power Distribution (WPD) in reviewing the data and information that they provide to stakeholders through their network and electric vehicle capacity maps.
Regen’s role
Regen is supporting WPD with stakeholder engagement to help them understand their users and the needs of existing and future network customers.
We have conducted a series of initial interviews to help WPD specify what customers need from a new online mapping tool, including what functionality and data they would most value. We have also launched a survey aiming to get wider feedback from users. The results will be used to inform and prioritise the development of the new tool’s functions.
Have your say
Complete the survey to let us know what data you would value from WPD and how you want to use the network capacity mapping tools.
The existing tools can be found at the links below. Please take a moment to look at the existing maps before taking the survey if you haven’t used them recently.
Timescales
Regen has worked with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) and the Isle of Wight Council to develop a load growth evidence case to enable investment in the island’s electricity network.
Project duration: May 2022 – June 2023
Project lead: Ray Arrell, Head of Future Energy Systems
The study’s core output was to provide a written evidence case report, to support SSEN’s business plan application to Ofgem, to unlock additional investment in the electricity network supplying/on the Isle of Wight. This investment will unlock capacity to enable the Isle of Wight’s future growth/aspirations to expand renewable generation, low carbon technology adoption, electrification of other sources of demand and wider net-zero ambitions.
The study built on the analysis and granular future scenario projections that Regen produced for SSEN’s Southern England licence area, through the latest edition of their Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) assessment: https://www.regen.co.uk/project/ssen-distribution-future-energy-scenarios/
In May 2023, Regen worked with Isle of Wight Council and SSEN to publish the summarising report for the electricity load growth analysis and evidence case for additional network investment:
For further information on this project, please contact Ray Arrell, Head of Future Energy Systems, rarrell@regen.co.uk
To meet the UK’s carbon reduction targets, the energy system will undergo substantial change. In order to plan for this energy system evolution, Regen and National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED) produce annual Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) for each of NGED’s four licence areas. This includes engaging over 125 local authorities alongside regional decision-makers, project developers, asset owners, energy consumers, community energy groups and trade bodies to develop bottom-up, stakeholder-led regional future scenarios to inform NGED’s network planning and investment.
Now an annual process for each Distribution System Operator, each DFES builds on the analysis and engagement undertaken over the previous years. The scenarios cover distribution-connected generation and storage, from solar and wind farms to gas-fired generation and batteries, alongside key sources of energy demand such as electric vehicles, heat pumps, new housing developments and hydrogen electrolysers, within the framework of the National Grid ESO Future Energy Scenarios (FES).
The outputs of the DFES 2023 are published on National Grid’s website here.
As the UK government ramps up ambitions to rapidly reduce carbon emissions on the way to a net zero 2050, the energy system is undergoing intense change – however, there is significant uncertainty around how this change may occur. In order to plan and prepare for this accelerating energy system evolution, Regen is working with National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED) to produce the 2022 Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) for each of their four licence areas, consulting with over 125 local authorities and regional decision-makers, project developers, asset owners, energy consumers, community energy groups and trade bodies to develop bottom-up, stakeholder-led regional future scenarios to inform NGED’s network planning and investment.
Now an annual process for each Distribution Network Operator, each DFES builds on the analysis and engagement undertaken over the previous years. The scenarios cover distribution-connected generation and storage, from solar and wind farms to gas-fired generation and batteries, alongside key sources of energy demand such as electric vehicles, heat pumps, new housing developments and hydrogen electrolysers, within the framework the National Grid ESO Future Energy Scenarios (FES).
The NGED DFES 2022 outputs, including four licence area reports and interactive data maps, have been published on NGED’s website here.
Regen has also undertaken DFES assessments for Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, covering their Southern England and North of Scotland licence areas; see here.
If you are interested in finding out more about this project with NGED or our wider work in future energy scenarios, please contact Jonty Haynes.