Project Summary

Trinity aims to address Challenge 3: Improving energy system resilience and robustness through the implementation and testing of control room simulation environments.

The pace of change for distribution level networks and markets is rapid -- the world in which DNOs operate is changing quickly and frequently. Maintaining this pace without a robust parallel control environment to enable this will only exacerbate the challenge. The rapid scaling of data volumes, control points and failure modes cannot be accommodated in a BAU environment without considerable risk. DNOs require the agility to test, learn and develop solutions in collaboration with distributed energy resource (DER) owners in a safe virtualised world to ensure the network is optimised and can handle any detrimental scenarios. They also need the capability to simulate future scenarios in safe, reliable environments that are representative of real-world network conditions, without risk of impact on the live production control system. This will also enable learning of how control engineers will interact with new technological solutions and respond to adverse network conditions.

Trinity has three key project partners:

GE - Developer of ADMS (PowerOn), a fully integrated, advanced network management solution that completely automates real-time management, monitoring, and control of electrical distribution networks. Trinity will build upon existing GE proof-of-concepts utilising UK Power Networks' expertise and data. They will provide expertise, environments for development, integration, and testing throughout the project.

UK Power Networks - DNO serving 8.4m homes and businesses across three distribution network areas and an end user of the integrated simulator. Will provide expertise, users, environments and data for development, integration, and testing. Embedding the project team alongside control room, and control systems and automation staff will ensure any solution meets user needs and can be practically implemented and scaled.

PNDC - Energy systems research, test and demonstration environment that concentrates on three primary research areas to enable the delivery of whole energy system solutions. Their core Control Room of the Future research programme is focused on developing the digital control room of the future to meet the UK's net zero energy targets. The vision for the focus area is to have a demonstrator of an intelligent and interoperable control room available for use by all DNOs.

SSEN have declared an interest in being involved if the project moves beyond the Discovery Phase and would introduce a complementary perspective and requirements of another DNO.

Innovation Justification

With the increasing volume of interactions coming into the DNO control room, and rapidly evolving network conditions, a fully integrated simulation environment is needed to create a way for DNOs to test new and challenging network scenarios. Fast and safe integration of new solutions which require control engineer's interaction for decision making are also needed. Simulator facilities will significantly enhance understanding of the distribution system and the assets connected to it allowing the level of disruptive risk associated with new network conditions to be more accurately assessed and mitigated against multiple scenarios that control engineers can learn from.

Whilst complex simulation occurs in both transmission and generation, it is still in its infancy in the distribution sector. For DNOs, there is less data available, a higher number of potential operational, and commercial scenarios, and more asset owners and network participants; all of which combine to increase complexity and challenges. Innovation support is required to safely develop this method at scale.

The NIA funded Future Control Room project led by SSEN with UK Power Networks and PNDC as partners serves as a strong foundation on which to launch Trinity. However, the NIA project was purely desk-based and the output was a conceptual simulator design. Trinity seeks to evolve and then implement this design. Consequently, GE have been included as Project Partners and are committed to making Trinity a success by building on ongoing work they are undertaking with UK Power Networks and other network operators in the UK and internationally.

Question 6, summarises the expected value at distribution level over the modelled period (2023-2050) against expenditure in three counterfactual categories:

• Annual load-related reinforcement expenditure
• Annual flexibility expenditure
• Annual control room expenditure

SIF governance is perfectly suited to Trinity as it ensures counterfactuals, costs and benefits are regularly reassessed and provides an opportunity to adjust scope, course correct or fast fail. Potential project costs estimated by the Future Control Room project include £10-20m capex and £1m annual opex. It is unlikely that any single DNO would make the level of investment necessary to address the scale and complexity of the problem alone.

Furthermore, SIF provides the opportunity for new partners to be added. The project will start with the minimum number of partners required, but at the end of each SIF phase we will reassess and bring in other technology partners and network operators as the specifications, design, and architecture evolve.

Project Benefits

The future reductions in the cost of operating the network from Trinity generally fall into three expenditure categories: load-related reinforcement (LRR), flexibility over-procurement, and control room expenditure. The estimated NPV of the project's impact on these categories is ~£138m for UK Power Networks alone over 2023-2050, which corresponds to an annual net present benefit of ~£4.9m.

The benefits are estimated based on UK Power Networks' average expected expenditure on the three categories based on numbers published in RIIO-ED2 business plans. These are scaled to 2050 using UK Power Networks' DFES load projections at primary substations as Trinity is expected to deliver annual long-term benefits beyond the project. A higher bound of £20m project CAPEX is used to calculate overall net present value, as this demonstrates the net positive impact of Trinity even when higher implementation costs are factored in.

To capture the benefits associated with increased use of flexibility and therefore reduced LRR, it is assumed that once Trinity is fully developed the number of substations with active flexibility in each modelled year will increase by 5% compared to the annual number in the absence of Trinity. In addition, it is assumed that Trinity increases the amount of flexibility used per substation by 2% in the last year of the project (2026/27) and 10% thereafter. It is further assumed that each £ of flexibility expenditure results in around £14 of LRR deferral, with a deferral period of nine years. This deferral ratio was calculated based on available RIIO-ED2 data across all DNOs by comparing their planned expenditure on flexibility with the LRR deferral this corresponds to.

The benefits associated with the decrease in flexibility over-procurement are captured through a partial reduction in the estimated amount of flexibility over-procured by DNOs. Whereas 30% of flexibility procured by DNOs is assumed to be usually over-procured to account for potential disruptions in the provision of flexibility services, Trinity is expected to reduce the amount of flexibility that is over-procured to 10%.

Finally, the benefits associated with lower costs of operating the control room are captured through an avoided cost of increased FTE employment units thanks to efficiencies driven by Trinity, with FTEs avoided by five in 2025/26 and by six thereafter compared to the number of FTEs that would have been required without Trinity. This is a high estimate and is subject to additional innovation being built atop of Trinity.