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UTILITY WEEK | 18TH - 24TH SEPTEMBER 2015 | 19 Operations & Assets Project length: four years Status: complete Estimated cost: £54 million Funding from LCNF: £27 million The Customer-Led Network Revolution (CLNR) project, led by Northern Powergrid, explored smart alternatives to reinforcing the network, as well as helping the DNO gain an understanding of how to deliver maximum network capacity at the least cost to customers. The government's plans to reduce car- bon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 will mean a widespread customer uptake of new sources of low-carbon generation and tech- nologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps. Head of regulation and strategy Jim Card- well says: "Government policy is leading to consumers doing things differently. They are using new electricity loads and mov- ing them across from other energy sources, so we must recognise that demand on local power grids may double by 2050. We must also recognise that all the solar PV coming on to the system is changing the way the network is having to operate. It's less about the traditional network-to-customer flow- down through the system and more about supplying neighbours, and what that means in terms of how we can work our system in the future. "So how can we enable customer changes being driven by government policy, and how can we do it at least cost while protecting service standards?" CLNR found that most domestic custom- ers are inherently flexible and contribute less to network peak demand than was previously assumed. The company also concluded that industrial and commercial demand-side response is a "viable and reli- able option" to address network constraints, both in terms of customer co-operation and post-fault response. However, good engage- ment by the industry will be critical in find- ing suitable demand-side response provision in the right geographic locations, because there are presently few customers willing or able to provide this service. Northern Powergrid has been sharing the findings from the project throughout. Now new tools, policy and technical recom- mendations, lessons learned reports, and guidelines for equipment and training will be shared with other DNOs. Northern Powergrid: Customer-Led Network Revolution Project length: two years Status: complete Estimated cost: £10 million Funding from LCNF: £10 million Electricity North West (ENW) started the Capacity to Customers project to trial smart grid technologies that would allow more power to be delivered to customers using existing assets rather than requiring addi- tional investment to expand the network. Over the next 25 years, the population of the North West is expected to grow by 10 per cent. Along with shiing to a low-carbon electricity system, this will provide a chal- lenge for ENW in terms of ensuring there is enough capacity on the network to meet increasingly fluctuating demand. The electricity network is designed to allow a DNO to re-route power around net- work faults, meaning that most of the time only half of its total capacity is used, with half reserved for emergency use. During the Capacity to Customers project, ENW discov- ered that, by reconfiguring the network, it could release the extra emergency capacity at other times. Head of engineering Steve Cox says: "The concept of the project was: can we use the inherent capacity, which is not normally used, to feed the additional power consump- tion by customers and, thereby, not have to make the network bigger? "The tricky bit was, if we do have a fault on the network, then we need to use that reserve capacity to supply customers. So if we add additional demand, how can we manage that demand?" The project demonstrated that the tech- nique is technically and commercially possible, as well as acceptable to a wide cross-section of the industrial and commer- cial customer base. The learning from the project will now benefit the other DNOs, with ENW hav- ing carried out an extensive dissemination exercise to brief them on the findings. Cox says: "We've shared the contracts with them, we've shared the marketing materials, we've shared how to communicate with customers and we've shared the technology to make it all work." Electricity North West: Capacity to Customers