Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) has received £550,000 of funding from the UK’s energy regulator for four new projects.
The four projects awarded funding by Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) encompass a variety of technologies, from AI, to 3D modelling, to data analysis.
The FastTrack project makes use of AI technologies to simulate the impact of connection requests across the network at all levels, using data on network capacity, current load, and external factors, to present a full overview of overall network demand. According to SSEN, the results from this analysis will provide network operators with valuable insights that will speed up future investment decisions while also helping network planners prioritise measures that improve connection times.
The RIDES (Rural Industrial Decarbonisation Support) project will help rural industries decarbonise by tackling the unique challenges of reinforcing networks in rural areas. Alongside project partners The Association for Decentralised Energy and Guidehouse, RIDES will develop a tool to help show how rural industries can decarbonise and supply networks with key information about where they should focus their future investments.
The Innovating Losses Analysis and Detection (I-Lad) project sees SSEN team up with Frontier Economics, CGI, and Scottish Power Retail to explore novel techniques to automate and modernise the collection, identification and modelling of data on network losses. While electrical losses are unavoidable when transmitting electricity, current technology can only estimate losses, making avoiding losses and saving costs difficult, something which I-Lad hopes to solve.
Finally, the 3D-AR project, developed in conjunction with SIA Partners, will provide a holistic overview of capacity and load on networks by leveraging asset and demand forecast data and advanced weather forecasting to understand where more capacity headroom can be opened on the network. This will enable network operators to understand where assets can be run for longer and at a higher capacity than at current static operating levels.
This is not the first time the SSEN has received SIF funding, having secured around £1 million for two projects in October.
Frank Clifton, innovation manager at Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, said: “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.”
