Our Innovation Team is pleased to announce that all our latest project submissions have been approved for a total of £550,000 funding from Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund.
The four projects on which work will now progress further are:
FastTrack
FastTrack harnesses the power of AI to better simulate the effect of connection requests across various layers in the network to understand the upstream impact. The project will utilise data on network capacity, current load, and external factors, to present a complete view of overall demand. This will provide network operators with valuable insights to make faster, better decisions on future investments. This will also help network planners prioritise measures to improve connection times.
Project partners:
Faculty
RIDES (Rural Industrial DEcarbonisation Support)
This project will support the decarbonisation of rural industries, which by their nature, are often located in places where it’s more complex and expensive to reinforce the network to deliver increased capacity. RIDES will develop a tool to indicate how rural industries can decarbonise and provide networks with an idea of what their future investments will need to be, saving money for the sector and accelerating the move to net zero.
Project partners:
The Association for Decentralised Energy
Guidehouse
I-Lad (Innovating Losses Analysis and Detection)
Electrical losses are unavoidable when transferring power across electricity networks, and current technology can only estimate losses, making it difficult to reduce losses effectively. I-LAD will explore novel techniques like synthetic data to automate and modernise the collection, identification and modelling of data on losses.
Project partners:
Frontier Economics
CGI
Scottish Power Retail
3D-AR
3D-AR will provide a new, holistic view of capacity and load on networks. This will offer insights into where more headroom can be unlocked on the network, and where assets can be run for longer, and at a higher capacity than current static operating levels. 3D-AR will combine asset and demand forecast data with advanced weather forecasting to deliver these useful new insights.
Project partners:
SIA Partners PLC
These projects have been successful at the Strategic Innovation Fund’s cycle ‘Discovery’ phase. The Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund is delivered in partnership with Innovate UK.
Frank Clifton, Innovation Manager at Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, says:
“The funding we’ve secured for these four innovation projects will mean these very worthwhile new ideas can keep on developing and maturing. I'm grateful for the support of all our project partners who helped these great ideas get this far.
"These projects are diverse in their focus, but they have a commonality in that they take a good, simple principle, and support that with informed thinking and creativity.
"This will benefit our customers in the longer-term and support our shared journey to net zero.”