Utility Week

34 | MARCH 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence Innovation in the face of challenges has marked the utilities sector's response to Covid-19 over the past year. Utility Week's Opera- tional Excellence hub seeks to highlight best practice in finding creative solutions to common problems. Here are some of the projects we have covered over the past month. Northern Gas Networks and Cadent to fund UK's first hydrogen homes Two semi-detached homes containing appliances fuelled entirely by hydrogen, the first of their kind in the UK, are to be built in Low Thornley, Gateshead. The project is being run by Northern Gas Networks and Cadent. https://utilityweek.co.uk/northern-gas- networks-and-cadent-to-fund-uks-first- hydrogen-powered-homes/ DNOs trial device for spotting faults UK Power Networks and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks have begun a trial of a new technology designed to spot network faults before they lead to power cuts. The distribution fault anticipation (DFA) devices monitor voltage and current on electricity circuits and match any abnormal waveforms with a library to identify the most likely causes. https://utilityweek.co.uk/dnos-trial-new- device-for-spotting-faults/ Anglian grows Shop Window project Anglian Water has set out plans to expand its Shop Window, the company's Newmarket test bed for innovation, to trial its projects with one million custom- ers before company-wide adoption. The programme, which started in 2015, has proved successful and will now extend to coastal areas of west Norfolk, south to Cambridge and including surrounding towns and villages. https://utilityweek.co.uk/anglian-grows- shop-window-project/ UU develops AI to distinguish leak size United Utilities' leak detection system has learnt to distinguish between leaks of different sizes based on acoustic and kinetic data from loggers in the network. The water company teamed up with Fido Tech last year to triangulate the precise location of leaks. https://utilityweek.co.uk/uu-develops-ai- to-distinguish-leak-size/ Op Ex Round-up Analysis T he engineering standards for the electricity system should "start off with customers" rather than being "written by industry people for industry use", the chair of a review panel has argued. Simon Harrison is the group strategic development director for Mott Macdonald and recently chaired an independent panel convened by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategic (BEIS) and Ofgem to review engineering standards for electricity, which published its findings in December. The panel noted a number of problems with the cur- rent arrangements, including that the landscape is larger and more complex than necessary; that there are critical gaps around interoperability, data and operations; and that change processes lack agility. However, the main overarching issue identified by the review is that standards are focused "too much on how things are done, rather than what should be achieved for customers". It said "the opportunity to provide a bet- ter and more customised service at lower cost is being missed" and that standards need to recognise "the value different customers place on supply reliability". "We're moving to a much more digitalised electricity and energy system and that presents a whole bunch of opportunities as well as challenges, and at the moment the engineering standards landscape doesn't really press those," Harrison told Utility Week. "Currently, the system of standards is industry- centric," he added. "It's written by industry people for industry use and it puts the technical needs of the indus- try first, whereas what we think is that should start off with customers and articulate what customers should be able to expect and what they are obliged to do, and then build the frame of standards off that so you're actually focused on the end outcome rather than on the network." Recommendations Among the specific recommendations made by the panel is that the Value of Lost Load, a measure of how much network users would be willing to pay to avoid an out- age, should be reassessed to take into account how different customers may value reliability for different devices. An independent review into engineering standards in the electricity system highlighted a number of issues with the current system. Its author Simon Harrison sets out his concerns. The customer must come first "If you're doing something new and you're putting some new copper in the ground, then size that not for the load but for the losses."

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