Local learning

Major insights into what a smart and flexible energy system of the future might look like came through Project LEO (Local Energy Oxfordshire), a four-year national demonstrator project, which ran a series of trials to understand how new technologies and services, particularly at the network edge, can benefit local communities and the energy system.

As a key partner in the project, SSEN tested multiple aspects of the DSO model via wide-ranging flexible electricity trials. These explored new flexibility products, services and market models; how to improve electricity networks to enable and manage smart, renewable, and storage technologies; and how to enable households and businesses to participate in the energy system.

The project explored potential use cases for local renewable energy assets, including a solar PV and co-located battery at a primary school, a hydro generator with an upgraded control system on the River Thames, and a new 19MW ground-mounted solar park, purchased for the project by the Low Carbon Hub, a social enterprise whose community networks underpinned the project.

According to Mairi Brookes, smart energy systems director at the Low Carbon Hub, this provided “insight into the transactional costs of participating, and the benefits of automation”, and the end-to-end processes needed to call on flexibility and find people to take part.

Under the current business model, the value stack of running community-scale renewables and battery storage and so on, “wasn't significant enough” to justify investment in getting more community-owned assets on the ground, says Brookes, “although this may change as the market evolves”.

It did make sense where an asset was already of sufficient scale and capability, with associated investment in smart automation, to plug into national grid-level ESO flexibility markets.

Potentially more significant insights, in the context of necessary changes to local distribution networks, came through Project LEO’s Smart and Fair Neighbourhood trials, working with six local communities with distinct characteristics to explore how smart technology and new commercial models could create opportunities in a local energy marketplace.

When attempting to install solar panels and batteries into a small number of houses, the connections team found a lack of information on the low-voltage network. This led to the development of a digital twin of the local electricity network, modelling in detail the implications of putting in the new connections.

“Having visibility and understanding of the low-voltage network, in a high level of detail, could be the difference between huge uncertainty over which substations need reinforcement first and having an efficient programme of substation investment over the next 50 years that only requires you to touch the network once at each location,” says Brookes.

Among the project's other findings, LAEPs, underpinned by good data and mapping, were identified as a valuable means of creating consensus and providing a common vision for a local area.

To this end, a follow-up research project, currently awaiting approval, would further build the case for integrating neighbourhood-scale detail on heating and transport electrification into LAEPs to facilitate the best possible solutions for the network. “That's the kind of scale that local people can engage with, make sense of, and want to have a say in,” says Brookes.

It would also aim to develop “more dynamic” digital platforms for LAEPs under which updated plans are nested on different levels and integrate work done at a regional, county scale with the neighbourhood scale, or the metropolitan equivalent.