The UK’s largest ‘smart grid’ project has now completed the first stage of its research into electricity consumption after establishing a series of ongoing trials with 12,000 customers predominantly in the North East and Yorkshire.

The £54-million Customer-Led Network Revolution (CLNR) project, part funded by Ofgem’s Low Carbon Networks Fund (LCNF), is testing a number of innovative solutions to ensure Britain’s electricity networks are fit for the future and ready for the mass uptake of low-carbon technologies, such as solar PV, heat pumps and electric vehicles.

CLNR hopes the project can help the UK to reach the government targets to reduce carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

According to CLNR, if the project speeds up the installation of low-carbon technologies by just one year, it could save the country around £8 billion in energy costs and 43 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Project objectives

The project, which started in 2011 and spans a three-year period, will see Northern Powergrid and its partners, British Gas, EA Technology and Durham University, continue to trial smart grid solutions on the distribution network within the electricity grid, as well as creating smart-enabled homes to give more flexibility to the way people use and generate electricity.

The five ‘Learning outcomes’ the project will pursue include:

• establishing a greater understanding of current, emerging and possible future load and generation characteristics;
• evaluating the extent to which customers are flexible in their load and generation, and the cost of this flexibility;
• focusing on network technology and evaluating the extent to which the network can be more flexible, and the cost of this flexibility;
• seeking to answer the question ‘what is the optimum solution to resolve network constraints driven by the transition to a low carbon economy?’ and;
• seeking to answer the question ‘what are the most effective means to deliver optimal solutions to customer, supplier and distribution network operator?’

Preliminary findings

Dr Liz Sidebotham, Communications Manager for CLNR, said the first stage of the project has been spent “actively studying thousands of residential, commercial and industrial electricity customers to better understand how much electricity people use, when they use it and for what purpose, and whether financial or other incentives can encourage them to shift their usage away from periods of peak demand”.

CLNR has said that while the research at this stage is still ‘preliminary’, a key finding revealed domestic customers had such a ‘huge appetite’ for their Time of Use (TOU) tariffs it was oversubscribed.

According to Sidebotham this shows that “customers are willing to take ownership of their electricity consumption in return for lower bills”. She added: “Through these trials we’ve seen early signs that customers are happy to change their usual daily routines – putting their dishwasher on overnight instead of during the day for example – to benefit from a cheaper tariff.

“This is hugely important because achieving a degree of customer flexibility in significant numbers is a win-win situation – offering customers a way to save money and network operators a means of cost-effectively reducing network demand at peak times.”

“Nothing short of a revolution”

President of Northern Powergrid, Phil Jones, added: “This is a project whose time has come. What is being contemplated in the electricity industry is nothing short of a revolution. It used to be that all the power came from a few power stations to every property – and all the energy flowed one way. The prospect of smarter networks opens up a whole new set of possibilities – customers can generate their own energy and use home-based technology to regulate how and when they use it.”

Later this year, CLNR is expected to publish more results that provide further insight into customer flexibility and the ‘effect of various interventions’ such as customer incentives to reduce electricity usage or increase generation.

The findings from all CLNR trials are being shared with other electricity distribution network operators across the UK and on the project’s website to ‘help the energy industry prepare for the low-carbon future’.

Read more about CLNR’s ‘smart grid’ project findings.