UK Power Networks is a distribution network operator for electricity covering South East England, the East of England and London. It manages three licensed distribution networks (Eastern Power Networks, South Eastern Power Networks and London Power Networks) which together cover an area of 30000 square kilometres and approximately eight million customers.In 2014 UK Power Networks was awarded £25 million from the electricity regulator Ofgem's Low Carbon Networks Fund for the Low Carbon London project. In 2011 it was awarded £6.7 million by Ofgem for another project, Flexible Plug and Play, which is researching new ways, technical and commercial, to connect renewable energy to the distribution network in Cambridgeshire.As well as the three distribution arms UK Power Networks also operates UK Power Networks Services Holdings Limited, which develops and maintains electrical networks for customers including London Underground, Heathrow and Stansted airports, Docklands Light Railway and Canary Wharf.
The connection queue in Great Britain (GB) is recognized as a major challenge for electricity networks and for the energy transition. The queue reached 726 GW in July 2024 for generation and storage, but it is also significant on the load side. The government, the regulator, and the industry have identified the drivers of this problem. One driver is the inability of the First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) rule (the de facto system of allocation) to account for the feasibility, progress, and value of the different projects applying for connection. This paper explores this latter aspect by applying concepts from auction theory, mechanism design, and queuing theory to a case study on the distribution network in GB. The paper discusses potential changes to the initial (primary) allocation of connection rights, considering auction concepts like the beauty contest and the Knapsack problem. It also explores queue management by introducing a secondary trading of connection rights to increase efficiency. The paper also discusses the risks and potential biases of such changes, including asymmetric information and strategic behaviour.
The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources in Great Britain's power system has resulted in a decline in system strength, which has given rise to sub-synchronous oscillations. Traditional methods of assessing system strength are inadequate for system operators to mitigate these oscillations, and therefore, new system strength assessment methods are needed. This paper presents the design of an end-to-end small-signal system strength monitoring process using online impedance measurements, developed through collaborative efforts of a consortium of industry and research partners. The process is based on the evaluation of frequency-dependent impedances from grid measurement data, followed by the computation of a new small-signal system strength metric, Impedance Margin Ratio. Considerations on the feasibility of a practical implementation of the process in a real-world system subject to measurement uncertainty, along with technical aspects such as the injection configuration, are investigated. The process is validated in electromagnetic transient simulations in PSCAD, on a power system model that resembles a high-inverter-dominated region in Great Britain. The results demonstrate that system strength is highly dependent on operating conditions highlighting the importance of evaluating it across multiple system operating scenarios.
