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38 | NOVEMBER 2020 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence Analysis Under pressure: Digitalising the gas grid Manually maintaining pressure across the gas grid is laborious and wasteful, but SGN is trialling a system for AI-controlled automation that it hopes will prove a game changer. James Wallin reports. T he world has changed for gas distri- bution networks but to a large extent technology and working practices have not. The journey of North Sea Gas entering the network at one end to be carried along a medium pressure and then lower pressure system and ultimately dispersed into peo- ple's homes is a 1970s solution coping with 21st Century demand. If the gas grid is to play a role in a net zero UK it will have to be adapted to carry hydro- gen and to allow biomethane to be injected into the system at multiple points. Even before we get to that stage, the whole system already has a gaping problem of leakage, with 2,300GWh disappearing from the grid every year. A significant driver of this has been the challenge of maintaining the right network pressure to ensure the supply is always more than a match for demand. This can only be done by adjusting the country's 26,000 governor stations – and as it stands this is largely a manual process. The current, clearly unsatisfactory, posi- tion is for the pressure to be set for the worst- case scenario, ie the coldest winter morning of the year. The cost for gas networks and for the environment is clear. To this end, work is underway to digi- talise the grid and find new, or improve on existing, methods of automatic pressure con- trol solutions that can react to demand in real time. 'An opportunity to do things differently' SGN is already trialling a way of operating governors in the Romsey area of Southamp- ton remotely as part of an ongoing innova- tion project. The company is using Utonomy's proto- type Active Grid Management system, which consists of controllers retrofitted to existing governors and loggers in the network which communicate with centralised soware. The controllers continuously adjust the governor set points to maintain optimum pressure lev- els across the network. SGN's head of innovation, John Richard- son, tells Utility Week: "There was obviously an opportunity to do things differently but when you're looking to make any sort of changes to how the gas network operates, safety has to be paramount, so we knew we would need to do a lot of testing." The Phase 1 field trial, in early 2019, saw the installation of the first system prototype at five district governors selected by SGN. This initial field trial stage completed at the end of November 2019 and the second stage will now look to appraise the latest prototype design and includes another field trial stage. This work is funded through SGN's Network Innovation Allowance, provided by Ofgem. It is proposed that the next stage will expand the test ground to south London and Edinburgh. Wales & West Utilities is also joining for this section of the trial, which will run until the spring. Utonomy founder and chief executive Adam Kingdon tells Utility Week there is widespread interest from other networks and that the solution fits in with Ofgem's incen- tives for the next price control. "Ofgem has put considerable weight on reducing average system pressures, which effect emissions, so the dra determination includes penalties for increasing average system pressures above the level in the last year of GD1 and rewards for dropping below Governor station mBAR mBAR gas supply Medium pressure M C D G Cloud-hosted services AI/machine learning Weather and other data Data platform 4G network Network sensors - pressure - flow - gas quality Remote control of governor stations Patented hardware retrofits to existing assets "Currently, biomethane plants have to flare, which is a huge waste and it's very expensive for the plants. It takes about five days for them to change their output." Adam Kingdon, chief executive, Utonomy Utonomy proposes end-to-end automated pressure control throughout the network