Trading Connections

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What the project is about How we’re doing it What makes it innovative What we’re learning

Project Data

Start date:

02/01/2024

End date:

12/31/2025

Budget:

£773,000

What is the project about?

When a customer receives a quote for a connection, they are added to the end of an ever-growing queue. In the UK, the total transmission and distribution (T&D) queue exceeds 700GW, with new customers facing waits of 10 years or more before their connections are completed. This challenge is not unique to the UK, as similar issues are seen globally.

Trading Connections seeks to tackle this problem by investigating connection queues and developing a public-access tool to visualise live demand capacity and queue data across all substations in the three UK Power Networks regions. This tool will be made available on the UK Power Networks Open Data Portal and Connections Portal.

By using the visualisation tool, customers will be able to adjust their connection plans to areas with available capacity, reducing the number of speculative applications. This shift is expected to help shrink the size of the connection queues, ultimately improving the efficiency of the entire connection process.

How we’re doing it

The project will create a visualisation tool designed to assist customers with their connection planning and applications. To ensure the solution meets their needs, we will engage with customers to gather insights on what data they’d like visualised to support their planning processes.

With these requirements in hand, the development phase will begin. The UK Power Networks Open Data team will build the tool for the Open Data Portal, while EA Technology has been selected to develop it for the Connections Portal.

Once the tool is developed, customers will be invited to test it and provide feedback on whether it meets their needs. Based on their input, we’ll move into a final development phase to refine the tool, ensuring it delivers exactly what customers require.

What makes it innovative

The project is innovative as it develops a tool to visualise live demand capacity, a feature not yet available elsewhere in the UK. By offering customers real-time, actionable data on demand capacity and connection queues across all substations, the tool provides valuable insights to support more informed connection planning.

What we’re learning

From initial stakeholder engagement and research, we have learnt that there is an appetite for demand capacity to be made available to the public. Going forward, we will be learning what data customers want to see and what data they would benefit most from having access to.

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