James was really excited to be building a new “zero carbon” house on his land. He had just received the planning permission and was ready to go with the equipment and prices but then his builder asked him “have you got a price for an electricity connection?
James hadn’t, so he went online, found his network operator and clicked through their connections page. He was able to put in what he wanted to do, show the exact position of the property and the space he’d planned for the electricity meter. Instantly online he could see the route the cable into his property would take and he got a price for the connection. He was ok with the price so he clicked through, checked the available dates, paid the deposit and booked in to have the connection made eight weeks later.
This may sound like a fairytale but is the experience electricity customers in UK can get today.
Why are electricity networks embracing this digital self-service approach?
In UK, the distribution network service providers (DNSPs) are seeing increasing volumes of connection requests, around five fold over the current regulatory period, which they are required to respond to at no charge to the requestor. Significant portions (up to 80% in some cases) of these requests are caused by people “optioneering” to find the locations with available capacity to install electric vehicle (EV) chargers, batteries or other distributed energy resources (DERs). This causes a problem. The network operators need to hire and train more people to respond to these enquiries, or to change their approach.
Speaking to several DNSPs, a typical LV acceptable quote following the traditional approach takes two to three and a half hours to put together. By changing to a self-service approach, this can be reduced to 15 minutes or removed altogether. One DNSP reported £8.8m (AUD$16.6 million) net present value of benefits over five years for HV alone, while another estimated £16m (AUD$30 million) for LV and HV.
These benefits do not include any incentives for improved customer service or stakeholder engagement that self-service may support. They do not include any benefit from other applications for the data generated as part of this process to support strategic network development. They also do not include any reputational benefit that making this service available might bring.
One UK DNSP moving towards self-service connections, NIE Networks, has said:
“Our vision is to start with budget estimates and in time, progress to formal quotations for new LV connections. This is intended to not only empower our customers to receive an estimate or quotation much more quickly, but also help triage a quantum of the more speculative enquiries that we receive on an annual basis, thus freeing up our planning engineers to focus on the design work that will be productive.”
How are networks delivering self-service connections?
Most UK DNSPs providing self-service connections use VisNet Connect from EA Technology – an online software tool that can be integrated with the DNSP’s data and systems to enable the self-service connection journey.
A customer would visit the connection pages on the DNSP’s website. They complete a short interview about the connection type, size and location. This passes to the user interface centred on the customer’s location.
The DNSP cables and transformers are colour coded on the map (red / amber / green) to show whether there is enough capacity there for the connection. Following the on-screen guidance, the customer draws their site boundary (where required), any premises outlines and meter points or cabinet locations.
Once the customer has completed this, it automatically choses a point of connection (PoC) with sufficient capacity on the existing network and draws a cost-optimised cable route. The customer can step back to make changes or click to submit their connection.
VisNet Connect then runs an electrical assessment to check voltage drop, loop impedance, cable and transformer utilisation. It creates a bill of materials for the connection and can generate a cost for connection to display to the customer. All the detail gets passed behind the scenes to the DNSP connections staff who can use the software’s internal interface to edit the design or create a quote plan if required.
But what about the data?
One of the most common objections to embarking on a journey to customer self-service is “my data is not good enough”. It is true that imperfect data will reduce the accuracy and potential applicability of a digital tool, but they can still provide significant value. The use case can also support investment in data improvement initiatives.
In one UK DNSP for example, they believed they have approximately 60 cable types on their network while their data showed 780 different cable types. Many of these were easily resolved as 185mm2 aluminium wave-con cable being listed as “185AL”, “185 AL”, “185ALWC” or similar. However 61% were either unknown type, unknown size, or both.
Based on working out where these cables were in the network and inferring the appropriate type or size enabled many of these to be mapped to the 60 known cable types. This meant they could be included in an electrical assessment and available capacity calculated. The electrical assessment calculates available thermal capacity, voltage headroom/footroom and whether network earth loop impedance is within limits. This particular DNSP went live with EA Technology’s tools with 53% of their cable sections having a valid electrical assessment and 86% of their transformers.
Other issues EA Technology have seen include geospatial gaps in network data, incorrect loops or meshes in networks, missing connectivity data or components, incorrect ratings or other data errors. Some of these can be addressed in an onboarding process to get started with self-service tools. Others have to be resolved over time as master data in corrected and improved data loaded into the self-service tools as part of a regular data update.
Conclusion
Self-service connection tools were first deployed about five years ago in UK. Since then, their capability and acceptance has grown, with 86% of Great Britain’s DNSPs now having some form of self-service connection tool on their website or being in contract to provide one. Most of these services are provided using VisNet Connect from EA Technology.
EA Technology believe that by the end of the decade, self-service solutions will be the norm for DNSPs globally. The improvement of data and software tools will enable the technology shift. The work volumes required by the transition to a decarbonised society will demand it. Networks need to be an enabler of, and not a barrier to, achieving net zero. Self-service connections are a key tool to help achieve this goal.
Explore VisNet from EA Technology’s range of innovative self-service connection tools here.
