Project Summary
Gaining consent from third party landowners to install, maintain, and upgrade network equipment is a challenge for network operators. When a customer wants to connect to the network or operational works are required, delays in securing consent from landowners is a barrier, causing frustration to all.
Wayl-ease seeks to create a transparent, secure platform for consents and link network operators and landowners via an automated self-service, online engagement and digital payment platform. By creating a novel data-led process to give customers visibility of consents, Wayl-ease will facilitate improved planning, faster network transformation and more informed customers.
Innovation Justification
The visibility and proactive management of consents across geographies is the first of its kind, not only in the industry, but across wider national infrastructure. Currently there is no digital mechanism for managing wayleave agreements available on the market. Furthermore, the existing process requires significant resources to ensure wayleaves are up to date. Wayl-ease is a step change for the industry, presenting a win-win opportunity for both customers and networks.
Activities currently limited by manual processes and administrative burden, in many cases taking up to three months due to slow interactions over e-mail and network operator teams awaiting customer responses, will be accelerated through automation and application of advanced digital technologies. More specifically, the project goes beyond incremental innovation through:
· The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify network assets from customer photographs.
· Data driven predictive changes in landownership
· Automated wayleave agreement generation
· Automatic map generation – creating the required map for inclusion in the wayleave agreement showing asset location within a customer’s land boundary.
By improving understanding and visibility of consents across the network, Wayl-ease will unlock novel routes to engagement with landowners and additional potential use cases for additional data in whole system network planning.
During Wayl-ease Discovery Phase, partners mapped existing processes used for wayleave agreements and identified key pain points for DNOs and customers. Each of these was assessed to identify novel solutions that could resolve the challenge. This led the partners towards an intelligent Asset Consents Platform (ACP) that provides clear and comprehensive information on customer entitlements, self-serve contracting, automated payments, as well as asset recognition and automatic map generation. This platform will unlock whole system planning and support network operators in managing wayleaves, ensure agreements are up to date, payment details are correct and when land ownership changes customers are empowered to manage their existing agreements as well as set up new agreements.
Alignment to SIF
Currently there is no dedicated development funding to offer this functionality to landowners or customers. Considerable customer engagement, systems investment and integration works are required to develop Wayl-ease into a solution that can facilitate faster and cheaper network transformation and asset rollout, which would not be achievable as part of business-as-usual activity. The proposed new process represents a shift from existing processes which have existed for decades. Substantial industry change, thorough an innovation project, is required to enable its adoption until sufficiently de-risked.
The feasibility development must be undertaken before widespread deployment, which is perfectly suited to the phased nature of SIF. In Alpha Phase we will test key functionality to determine which features should be included in the final solution. We will also be engaging with different network operators to understand how we scale this problem and address the challenge nationally.
The current TRL and IRL is low (2-3) as this level of digitalisation of wayleave process has not been undertaken elsewhere. The Discovery Phase bought this forward from TRL 1 through determining the feasibility and developing a roadmap for future solutions. The scale of the Alpha Phase aims to build a first iteration of technical architecture and map existing data sources to the solution (TRL and IRL of 4-6). Through a Beta Phase project, we aim to achieve TRL 8.
Wayl-ease is aligned to the Challenge 1 Theme 1 as it creates an efficient and innovative way to facilitate the setup of new wayleave agreements. This will accelerate the pace to Net Zero through whole system planning to allow the expected increased number of assets, managed by electricity networks, on third party lands.
Impacts and Benefits
The pre-innovation baseline involves network operators processing wayleave enquiries and setting up new agreements using the current business as usual (BAU) approach. This approach involves the exchange of emails or letters between landowners and properties and consents team members to determine proof of landownership, entitlement to payment, the creation of a map to capture the location of network operator assets on third party lands, the drafting and signing of an agreement and the set up of payment. This represents a “do nothing” approach.
In the initial CBA we have assessed the benefits of Wayl-ease across two different deployment scales.
· Option 1: NPV of £15m. This represents rollout across UKPN starting in 2028. No rollout to other DNOs or networks is covered. This was chosen as a conservative assumption, as other networks are still in the process of digitising their wayleave agreements.
- Benefits (NPV): £19m
- Costs (NPV): £4m
· Option 2: NPV of £56m. This represents rollout across UKPN starting in 2028. It is then assumed other DNOs will take an additional two years to fully digitise their consents agreements, after which they will rollout Way-lease. Other non-electricity networks, and transmission operators are not included in this estimate but will be considered as part of the CBA to be prepared during the Alpha Phase. This was calculated based on a scaling factor between the number of customers in UKPN against other networks.
- Benefits (NPV): £64m
- Costs (NPV): £7m
The cost-benefit calculation for both options was performed from 2024 - 2050. Benefits begin to accrue in 2028, following a two-year Beta Phase
Benefits identified:
Financial - future reductions in the cost of operating the network
· Avoided third party costs: UKPN pay £0.3m per year on external support to handle the generation of new wayleave agreements. A 50% reduction due to increased efficiencies is assumed based on engagement during Discovery Phase. This represents an NPV of £2.1m.
· Avoided diversions: Data on alterations to the existing network was used to calculate the average number of diversions, and the average cost per year. UKPN estimates that 50% of diversions are discretionary/aesthetic in nature. Assumptions based on Discovery Phase engagement are a 20% reduction in the number of discretionary/aesthetic diversions due to Way-lease. This would represent an NPV of £15m. Wayl-ease will ensure Wayleave payments are completed on time and to the correct people, ownership updates are completed, and customers can easily access necessary information. This will increase transparency and is expected to reduce the number of requests for the removal of network assets from customer properties.
Financial - cost savings per annum for users of network services
· It is estimated that on average customers spend 2 hours to resolve issues. 10,000 enquiries are handled per year (UKPN data), £10.5 per hour of customer time (CBA Fixed Data Proxy). 50% reduction due to Wayl-ease based on Discovery Phase engagement. NPV of £1.4m Wayl-ease will improve information quality and accessibility, saving customer time.
Environmental - carbon reduction – direct CO2 savings per annum
· Reduced visits to customer premises will decrease CO2 emitted by operational vehicles.
New to market - services
· The project will develop a customer-facing consents tool, ensuring up-to-date records and allowing simplified self-service for wayleave agreements.
New to market – processes
· Challenges related to wayleaves are not unique to the energy sector, all critical national infrastructure operators utilise wayleaves in some form, leading to benefits in other industries.
All benefits are linked to the deployment of the Wayl-ease solution into BAU following Beta, although some may be realised during the Project.
