High Voltage (HV) Auto Quote will provide self-service connection offers to customers enquiring about connections between 300 kVA and 1 MVA. Furthermore, it aims to provide budget estimates for connections from 1 MVA to 2.5 MVA. This project will codify the tacit logic used in HV quotes to enable this automation, together with development of logic to assess the cost of traffic management (TM). TM is an increasingly large component of quotes as voltage levels increase.
Budget estimates are currently offered to customers in other network areas for low voltage (LV) networks. However, lack of traffic management integration prevents connection offers being issued at HV levels. This innovation project will perform the necessary analysis and development to put connection offer requests in the hands of the consumer, allowing them to see the cost of different options interactively, reducing time to deliver connection offers and improving service delivery.
Benefits
This project has the potential to deliver substantial benefits to customers and society through greatly reduced times for HV connection offers which allow the requestor to interact with the connection offer process, altering parameters such as the connection point, to find the most optimal location to connect to the network before the quote is issued rather than requesting multiple manual quotes. This should facilitate the accelerated uptake of low carbon EV charge points and new housing projects.
This is estimated to provide £8.8m (NPV) of connection offer generation effort saved across RIIO-ED2. This effort can then be re-focused on providing higher impact services as well as minimising costs to DUoS customers from abortive work, particularly in light of Access and Charging Reforms which entail a greater proportion of connections costs being borne by DUoS customers in the future.
Learnings
Outcomes
The HV Auto Quote tool has been successfully integrated with the UK Power Networks enterprise systems, SAP, Smart Gateway and the EDM. The integration ensures the tool’s costing logic is linked to costing data in SAP, while the heatmap is directly linked to the Network map data from the EDM.
The HV Auto Quote budget estimate functionality has been deployed in the test environment and tested with over 85% pass rate with great accuracy. The tool is now being prepared for go live in June 2024.
Lessons Learnt
The Project has not discovered any significant problems with the trialling of the Method. However, HV Auto Quote will not be integrating into UK Power Networks’ Smart Connect Platform as per the original Method as Smart Connect is not an appropriate platform for the integration of HV Auto Quote as it was developed for LV connections.
HV Auto Quote has now been integrated with UK Power Networks’ new connections portal, Smart Gateway, and the UK Power Networks website. In addition, the Method describes that only location data will be processed by Auto Quote. However, the project has learnt that additional customer data is required to integrate with UK Power Networks’ enterprise systems.
Further development and testing have taken place since October 2023. Through this testing, we have learnt that the traffic management logic must consider a broader range of possible combinations in order to provide project-specific solutions to customers.
Future features and enhancements that were identified but are not within the scope of implementation have been documented and are useful lessons learnt for future projects.
Through implementation, the project has come across various data quality challenges such as Netmap data traversibility and inconsistency between Netmap data and PowerOn data, which could apply to future projects.
We have also learnt that identifying and early engagement with other business stakeholders that have an interest in the same problems and challenges we are finding can help to provide and develop longer term solutions that provide benefits beyond innovation and this project.
