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UTILITY WEEK | 3RD - 9TH FEBRUARY 2017 | 19 Event SPEAKER PREVIEW: Stewart Reid, head of asset management & innovation, SSEN Ofgem has stated it wants more innovation that has been funded through the Network Innovation Com- petition to be adopted as business as usual (BAU). How effective is the funding in achieving that conversion to everyday practice? "There is a limit to how much you can learn in an innovation-funded environment. Things like commercial risk and contractual risk are distorted by innovation funding. Deploying things into BAU requires a differ- ent set of criteria than what funded innova- tion projects are measured against, and as a result you get different types of outcomes." How much of a challenge will it be to move from innovation to BAU? "There are a whole range of challenges from changing internal views to presenting business cases. It's about new ways of work- ing, new skills in the industry, and about businesses taking on the risks that they have never experienced before and how you actually go about quantifying these risks and presenting them in a language that a business can understand." What are the next steps for moving into BAU? "It's not a big bang approach that is needed. Innovations that we are working on at the moment don't necessarily work in all parts of the country in all scenarios at once. One of the key things we have to acknowledge with smart solutions is that there will be certain parts of the network where there is more stress and differing socio-political fac- tors and topography. This means solutions work in one place but not at all in another. So we have to accept that innovation needs to grow geographically." How does innovation need to change to adapt to decentralisation and how dif- ficult will this be for network operators? "Here, complexity is the issue. We need to find ways in which the scale of the com- plexity can be kept manageable. If you are managing locally and innovating locally then the number of permutations you end up with very quickly get into 100,000s. The question is how to make that manageable. At the moment, transformers in London are the same as those in Orkney, it's a very standardised approach across the country, so what you are talking about is moving to a world where management by exception is going to be an absolute requirement." SPEAKER PREVIEW: Paul Bircham, networks strategy & technical services director, ENW When networks talk about behaviour change, what do they mean? "Electricity North West conduced a three year study, known as the Power Saver Challenge, into the feasibility and demonstration of engaging consumers to change their energy consumption behaviour and thereby avoid the need for costly and disruptive network reinforcement. The project was a success and the final report will be published shortly. This demonstrates that a 4 to 5 per cent sustainable reduction in peak electricity demand can be achieved. The project also showed that to secure and utilise a behavioural change by customers, significant behavioural change is required on the part of the DNO too." How hard will it be to change the behaviour? "The success of the project shows that behavioural change by the DNO and its customers is difficult but achievable." Is there enough time for the DNO to adapt to the EV transition, whenever that might be? "My belief is that the EV transition will be the next rapid change in the journey towards a low carbon economy. However, there is sufficient capacity in the current distribu- tion networks to support the initial rollout of several million EVs. This fact, coupled with the ability of other innovative developments, including the development of the distribution system operator role, will provide suf- ficient time for DNOs to undertake the necessary adaptation to ensure that the EV transition is achieved." Are we all working towards the same model of DSO? "The concept of the DSO is in its early stages and, consequently, there are many differing views of what the role entails. "I am confident that a well thought through DSO model will emerge. How quickly this can be achieved is a different challenge." SPEAKER PREVIEW: Richard Smith, head of network capability (Electricity), National Grid In the changing energy landscape, how is the role of system operator changing? "It's changing with the shi towards digitisation, decentralisation, and decarbonisation. There is increasing penetration of embedded genera- tion, more solar and storage, and the nature of demand is also shiing. "This all affects how the system works. That leads you into things like needing new services to manage that to the same level of security that we have had in the past. The emergence of distribution system operators is a part of that decentralisation and will help provide those new services. "On top of that there is a move towards competition in the transmis- sion system." What is National Grid doing to address those challenges? "There is a host of different ways of operating that we will need to consider. In our system oper- ability framework, we set out several hundred pages' worth of things that need to be considered, some of them you can call challenges and some you can call opportunities and I hesitate to refer to them as either specifically. "There are many interesting meaty and specific technical innovations going on. We have just been awarded funding for our Network Innova- tion Competition project TDI 2.0. It will look very specifically into the distribution system's transmission interface and how it needs to evolve. The project is being carried out jointly with UK Power Networks." What is the future of the network system over the next 5-10 years? "Decarbonisation will continue, decentralisation will continue over the next few years, we should expect to see within the industry more testing of different solutions as to how we manage the power system at all levels. More experimentation in how we deliver efficient and economic solu- tions that don't affect consumers." Sponsored by: