Utility Week

32 | APRIL 2023 | UTILITY WEEK Electricity Analysis Empowering local communities Utility Week speaks to Northern Powergrid about its trials to cede some control of local electricity networks to communities while guarding against unintended consequences for the wider system. N orthern Powergrid recently secured £15.4 million of funding through the latest round of Ofgem's Network Inno- vation Competition to undertake a smart local energy systems trial in four communi- ties across its region. So what is the com- pany hoping to learn from these trials? "What we're not doing is installing a whole load of low-carbon technologies," says head of innovation Iain Miller. "We're looking to find where there are communities who have an interest in this already, maybe already have some of this up and running, and see how we can facilitate that, how we can integrate it, get it to work together." The Community Distribution System Operator (DSO) project will see Northern Powergrid delegate some of the emerging DSO functions to four local communities around the country, allowing them to take responsibility for managing the operation of their local electricity network, albeit within limits set by the company. Miller says this local energy system bal- ancing will enable the communities to get the most out of both their existing assets and the network and create space for the connec- tion of more low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. A key challenge is resolving issues around the interoperability of their assets – "getting different people's equipment to talk to each other". Recounting his own personal experiences, Miller says this can sometimes be problematic even within a single home. Paul Glendinning, the company's markets director, makes a comparison with the Smart Energy Network Demon- strator on the campus of Keele University, which was "done by one mastermind brain" using the same equipment and communications protocols, and all behind the meter: "That's unachievable for a community". He says the Community DSO project will seek to create a similar system but where "the single point of contact, the brain if you like, could just be a housing association or a parish council". "It's really about trialling the technical solutions, which we think are available but need to be tested to make sure they work in a plug-and-play situation," he adds. The project will develop and test the idea of organising local energy systems into a hierarchical "nested cell" structure mirror- ing the voltage levels of the power grid. At the lowest level, a cell could comprise a single low-voltage feeder, per- haps serving a hun- dred cus- tomers or fewer. Their assets would be integrated together to form a smart local energy sys- tem, with their actions being optimised within the constraints imposed by the distribution network opera- tor (DNO) for that particular feeder. At the next level up, a num- ber of feeders below a transformer could be com- bined together to form another cell. The actions of the lower lev- els cells would likewise be optimised within the constraints set by the DNO for that trans- former. Transac- tions would only take place within cells. This struc- ture could be rep- licated for each voltage level of the power grid. Miller said that under this model assets will only need to be interoper- able with other assets

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