National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED) has published its Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES), to support strategic network planning.
The distribution system operator (DSO), part of National Grid which owns the UK’s transmission network, says its future scenarios show how it expects demand and generation to grow until 2050, in alignment with the Future Energy Scenarios (FES) 2024 that National Grid ESO published last year, ahead of the transition to the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
The release of the DFES is built on data gathered in partnership with market analyst Regen “to understand the significant impact that the growth in low carbon technologies, generation and storage will have on our network.”
It projects the capacity from renewable sources that will come onto the distribution network up until 2050, which will allow it to plan where the network will need to change or grow to support low carbon technologies.
Broken down across the areas that NGED’s network covers, the South West, South Wales, East Midlands and West Midlands, the DFES lays out “credible futures” for the growth of the distribution network, broadly aligned with National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios.
The DFES incorporates the plans of 120 local authorities across NGED’s license areas, as well as major industry and business. The DSO says it accounted for nearly 8,000 local projects and plans in the forecasts.
It also includes technology-based projections, this time including four new sectors in its planning: maritime, aviation, rail and agriculture. This, NGED says, demonstrates its proactive approach to future network forecasting. In a LinkedIn post, DSO engineer at National Grid Hannah Lewis said those sectors are “often missed in this kind of modelling”.
Oli Spink, DSO head of system planning, explained: “By using DFES 2024, we can gain a better understanding of how our network can grow and operate in a smart, flexible manner. Over the next year we will be using DFES to plan our investment programme for the coming years, incorporating industry changes such as the government’s Clean Power 20230 plan, the creation of Regional Energy Strategic Plans and in preparation for the next regulatory price control.”
As part of its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, released at the end of 2024, the government spelt out how much renewable generation and energy storage it estimated would be needed in different parts of the country.
Those estimates form part of the methodology through which the grid connections queue will be reorganised this year meaning, in theory, generation built more based on where it needs to be.