The requirements of our network are changing, driven by customers’ needs, decentralisation of generation now connected throughout our network and decarbonisation focussed on the increasing transition of the transport and heat sectors to electricity.
We are committed to digitalising our business to ensure that we remain an efficient and effective operator of our network and deliver data and solutions in the right format, at the right time to customers and stakeholders to meet their needs and ambitions.
Our focus to improve our data management, increase network insight and operation and to presume data as open will ensure that we deliver these aims to further improve our business efficiency, turn our data in to information to benefit customers, deliver insight for network capacity and connection planning and new service propositions.
We understand improving our data management is a journey that we need to track and measure to ensure we continue to focus in the right areas. We have already demonstrated improvements in our data management processes through targeted project activity to understand our data sets, lineage (how our data is derived and where from), and business and third-party use.
Leveraging value from data is fundamental to becoming a digitalised business. Innovation projects we have delivered have developed new solutions capable of providing enhanced visibility of our network, what it’s doing and what it’s likely to do. These solutions, together with advanced control systems, are being rolled out across our regions.
We continue to add both raw datasets and user-friendly tools, in the form of interactive maps and systems to the Energy Data Hub. We understand that access to our data is vital to support a variety of current and future elements of the electricity and wider energy system. We also recognise that the needs of different customers and stakeholders are varied and data may need to be presented in different formats.
The Energy Data Hub has been created to enable easy access to all of the existing data that WPD currently share with the industry, regulator and the customer.
Flexible Power has been created by WPD to deliver the procurement of demand response services.
Our Network Strategy Team is responsible for a number of key outputs to help shape the future development of the distribution network and the role of WPD as a Distribution System Operator.