Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 11TH - 17TH JANUARY 2019 | 19 Operations & Assets of these will need to be mandated across an area, he believes. "You cannot convert one house to hydro- gen and their neighbour to biomethane. A biomass or electric district heating scheme will require all properties in an area to convert to be viable. If the gas network is removed in an area, all the homes and busi- nesses will face the same problem, and will need a pragmatic, community-level solu- tion," he says. Multiple benefits Local area energy planning has the poten- tial to benefit all organisations involved. For example, the approach could help building managers and local government to identify high energy use public sector-owned build- ings that could be retrofitted, and build the evidence base for assessing community infrastructure contributions such as new energy centres or distributed generation. Meanwhile, the process could support electricity and gas distribution network oper- ators to identify potential energy network constraints from new housing developments or heavy deployment of renewables, and finding potential resources for demand man- agement and local balancing. Halsey explains that local area energy planning attempts to bring the land use planning and network planning processes together, rather than creating a new one. "We're not trying to change the established processes of the local council or the network, but rather to create a space through which those activities could be shared to create a shared plan," he says. Local area energy planning could work on the same basis as neighbourhood or trans- port planning, which relate to the council's main land-use plan process, but have their own structure, he suggests. "It could provide evidence and informa- tion to support the other planning processes, for example to inform an area of spatial plan or housing allocation. It could form part of a RIIO2 application, or it could inform the analysis of the planning application for a major distribution asset. It would be some- thing that would connect these processes," he explains. Business and technology consultancy Baringa Partners has been working with the ESC since 2014, when it began develop- ment of the Energy Path Networks tool, an advanced local area energy planning tool that enables the gathering and analysis of a wide range of data impacting energy demand and supply for an area. James Greenleaf, director of energy mar- kets and analytics at the consultancy, says Ramsbottom To ttington Prestwich Bury Radcliffe Whitefield A SPATIAL ENERGY PLAN FOR BURY Disctrict heat dominated Tottington, Hollins, Bury Town East Electric/district heat mix Tottington West, Bury Town North, Prestwich Electic/gas mix Ramsbottom, Radcliffe, Whitefield that typically all those making decisions on energy were "doing it through their own lens" – electricity networks would consider electricity, gas networks would consider gas, while local authorities would stick to their own housing stock. "No-one had a way of bringing together a holistic picture for a real-world area, and create an objective evidence-based plan to reduce CO2 emissions significantly over time," he says. Test of concept Over the past three years, the ESC has piloted the concept in three areas: in England Bury, in Greater Manchester, and Newcastle, and in Wales, Bridgend, involving local authori- ties and electricity and gas networks in each. Electricity North West is one of the part- ners involved in the Bury project. Ian Povey, strategic planning manager at the network, says that, in the past, it was relatively sim- ple to forecast future electricity demand by consulting plans for potential new housing, commercial or industrial development, and then converting that into electricity demand. "Now the future is so different we're not in that position. We need to work with people like the local councils to get a greater under- standing of what people want to achieve and then how that can be done," he says. The pilots highlighted several challenges to the approach. One mentioned by several participants was access and managing data and information across the energy system and built environment. Povey says: "We have a lot of data about electricity networks, Cadent has data for gas networks, and the local authority has its own data on their eco- nomic areas. The problem is bringing it all together because you end up with an awful continued overleaf

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