Learnings

Outcomes

During WP1, 13 organisations were engaged across all police, ambulance and fire services. Four key challenge areas were identified that are highly relevant to the emergency services specifically, and contain considerable implication for UK Power Networks:  
Challenge 1: Emergency services’ connection requirements are uniquely complex and expensive, whilst facing significant budget constraints  
Due to the intricacies of the estates and fleets operated by emergency services, decarbonising them presents a unique challenge. Increasing cost and time pressures are resulting in the condensing of connections applications into an increasingly small window, with UK Power Networks aiming to be an enabler of decarbonisation programmes, as opposed to a blocker.    
Challenge 2: Optioneering requires considerable input from UK Power Networks’ resources   
The emergency services lack sufficient knowledge, information and technical resources to be able to identify and analyse the different options associated with their connection requirements. This results in sub-optimal applications being prepared and submitted to DNOs.  UK Power Networks invests considerable resources into supporting applications that have been made in a sub-optimal way. There is a large opportunity to open access to the information required to analyse options and grid-specific conditions before the emergency services spend time and money on an application that is not optimised for a specific site.   
Challenge 3: Connections planning requires a more consolidated approach between organisations and departments within the organisations  
There is a lack of coordination within organisations, between fleet and estate decarbonisation efforts. These teams have been managed individually historically, but electrification is now aligning their priorities and programmes.  There is also a lack of coordination between different emergency service organisations. There is considerable opportunity for efficiencies and learnings to be shared between organisations, as there are similar operational constraints, risks and challenges.    
Challenge 4: There is uncertainty around emergency services’ resilience planning    
As the emergency services become progressively reliant on electricity, the risks associated with outages and fluctuations in electricity prices increases. UK Power Networks has the potential to play a critical role in the development of a resilience strategy, supporting the identification of resilience options and risk mitigation strategies.    
 
While the project is still ongoing, the project expects to assist emergency services in their decarbonisation planning through providing a solution to increase clarity, accuracy and efficiency regarding connection upgrade applications and future resiliency planning, as well as visibility for UK Power Networks to improve network planning decision making. These outcomes will be reported once monitored and completed. 

Lessons Learnt

There are a number of potential lessons that can be learnt from running the project so far: 
 
Structure of emergency service organisations 
It is critical to establish a good understanding of the structure of the emergency services you are engaging, including the roles that each undertake. As an example, the ambulance service in England have the UK Government level, the national commissioning and oversight organisations (such as NHS England), national representative membership organisations (such as the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE)), regional bodies (such as NHS England Regional Teams) and the NHS Ambulance Trusts (such as East of England Ambulance Service). While the team had a relatively good understanding of each organisation’s role before the engagement, it is important to place any comments, needs and perspective in the context of each organisation’s role within the structure. It was often noted that organisations from different tiers would ask for different tool features. Additionally, one cannot consider each organisation in isolation due to the interactions between them and their roles. As such, for Blue Light, it is likely that we will need to provide functionality for an organisation to allow access to their plans for another organisation to allow visibility across all levels of the ambulance service structure. Improved consideration of this structure and dependencies could enable future projects to reach an acceptable solution faster.  
 
Skillset and responsibilities within emergency services organisations 
Emergency services organisation are structured differently, with differences in terms of roles and responsibilities between each. There are also a range of skillsets and energy understanding across organisations as well as the unique attributes at each site. It can be difficult to establish the correct person to engage with for the decarbonisation of sites and/or fleets. Additionally, the DNO find that several different people from the same organisation will engage them separately regarding operations or connection upgrades, potentially from a site, region or national perspective. It was determined from WP1, that any solution must try to increase collaboration and clarity within organisations to ensure individuals operating at all levels, can understand where others are also planning and engaging.  
 
Availability of data 
This was a key barrier in WP3.  The challenge was the capacity of emergency service resources to engage with the project, and for other tasks to take priority. While this is completely understandable, it resulted in a delay to the project. In future, the project team would look to better estimate the resource requirement from emergency services and communicate this more clearly upfront, as well as encourage the project partners to engage with the relevant other teams (e.g. legal, data, procurement) earlier to avoid delays. We would also look to increase the time dedicated to sharing data in future project plans. 
 
User testing  
End solution users have been engaged throughout the project so far and have provided useful insights at every step. Users that were engaged during WP1 were mostly happy and excited to be engaged again for WP2 as they were intrigued to see the solution development and provide more detailed feedback on the layout and features that could help counteract the challenges identified in WP1. This strong and positive engagement throughout the project will play a key role in its success when the solution is built.