Project Summary

Resilience is increasingly important as customers rely more on electricity for heatand transportation, with greatest value in rural locations that have a heightenedrisk of outage. Proliferation of Low Carbon Technologies across LV and HVsystems present opportunities, if coordinated appropriately, for delivery ofresilience services that maintain customer supply during unplanned grid outages.Previous projects have demonstrated separate approaches via LV-connected andHV-connected resilient DERs. Coordination of such solutions can enhance thevalue case of resilience. The project will compare and contrast technologies andoptimise hybrid applications of the two approaches to deliver cost-effectiveresilience to customers.

Innovation Justification

The project applies within the Improving Energy System Resilience and Robustness challenge theme and directly meets the requirements through demonstration of coordinated approaches to delivering distribution network resilience, specifically delivering supply to customers in rural areas during higher-probability-than-average grid outage conditions.
The project builds on learning from both MicroResilience (NIA) and RaaS (NIC) projects, taking the single-deployment cases from both projects and demonstrating the enhanced value of coordinated deployment of multiple MicroResilience solutions in a network area, complemented by coordination with the RaaS HV resilience solution. Both projects have featured widespread dissemination and stakeholder engagement.
The project will deliver resilience through the islanded operation of HV and LV network areas, where electricity supply is provided via existing distributed energy resources connected to the network. This is not standard practice for distribution network operations, where traditionally resilience is provided by network infrastructure redundancy, and where temporary supply under outage conditions is provided (eventually) via diesel generators. The entire MultiResilience proposition presents a new way of operating rural networks under outage conditions and involves the novel real-time coordination of both network assets and third-party energy assets.
The closest state-of-the-art is reflected in the MicroResilience and RaaS innovation projects, which have demonstrated the delivery of resilience from single-source solutions to very specific network areas. MultiResilience will expand on these projects significantly, where the coordination of the distinct solutions will enhance the value case and improve the scalability of these solutions. We note these previous demonstrations have been solely in the context of innovation trials.
The proposed MultiResilience solution expands on solutions that have been recently demonstrated to TRL7 at single locations. These have levels IRL5 and CRL5. The proposed MultiResilience solution of coordinating these higher TRL solutions will enter this project at TRL3 and following demonstration achieveTRL7/8.
The project builds on existing innovations that are being demonstrated on networks today. To achieve the full coordination of these solutions and enhance the resilience provided by the solutions, a network demonstration is required to explore the operational interactions between solutions and evidence the value case under grid outage conditions.
The project introduces undemonstrated technical innovations, consisting of solutions to manage network areas as electrical islands, which has untrialled technical risk requiring funding through innovation channels . There are also substantial economic and social challenges, such as (i) what is the best way to incentivise the resilience from third-party providers, (ii) how strong should these incentives be at different voltage levels and (iii) how can rural customers and communities be encouraged to participate.
Without this project, a counterfactual approach would be to deploy RaaS and MicroResilience as single point-solutions that address a reduced range of outages on highly specific network areas. But without demonstrating the coordination between the solutions, any overlapping deployment of the solutions to a similar network area will introduce potential conflicts and require a single solution to be picked as a 'winner'. This would overlook the value case of the complementary solutions and would fail to derive value from the combination of both solutions.
Another alternative might be to reinforce the network. For resilience, this may have limitations as the redundant assets are generally close to each other and therefore subject to similar weather and storm risks. Further this approach does not embed resilience deep within the network and provide security beyond its immediate location . Finally, reinforcement in rural areas can often be very challenging due to the required circuit lengths, and environmental and consenting challenges. Consequently, the improvement in resilience using additional network may be expensive and of low benefit. 

Impacts and Benefits

When deployed at scale, MultiResilience will allow third party distributed energy resources (DERs) to enhance more efficiently HV and EHV network resilience, compared to uncoordinated energy resources. Once RaaS and MicroResilience are complete, DERs in the LV network will support secondary networks, and DERs in the HV networks will support primary networks. MultiResilience enables a smaller total volume of DERs (e.g., fewer MW and MWh of batteries) to deliver the same resilience outcomes for consumers. If this resilience is remunerated through a new service, then this will mean reduction in the costs that DNOs spend on 3rd party resilience services, leading to cost savings in bills, and cost savings for users of network services without impacting network resilience.
Potential benefits have been estimated against a counterfactual where DERs in HV networks (like RaaS) are used to enhance resilience. We assume there will be widespread need for these services due to (i) an increase in unforeseen and extreme weather events with a changing climate, and (ii) the electrification of heat and transport increasing society's willingness-to-pay for a more resilient electricity system.
We have conservatively assumed that, in the counterfactual, a RaaS-type service would be required on all the most rural networks in NPg's licence area. Analysis of NPg data shows that there are 65 primaries for which almost 100% of the downstream secondary substations are located in rural areas, according to 2011census classifications. This is around 10% of the primaries in NPg's two licence areas. We assume that the resilience of each primary would rely on a RaaS solution sized to 2/3rd of its peak demand, receiving a payment of £10,000 / MW /year. Peak demand projections for each primary come from NPg's DFES for the Consumer Transformation scenario. These figures combined give an estimate of the total payment required for third-party resilience services in the counterfactual.
We also assume that there is widespread deployment of additional DERs and batteries in the LV network, and behind the meters of domestic and non-domestic customers, including agricultural customers. MultiResilience will enable these DERs to support the larger RaaS-style battery, meaning it can be smaller and reducing the capacity for which the DNO needs to contract. These are rolled outgradually during RIIO-ED3. We have assumed these resources allow the RaaS-style service capacity to be reduced by 20%. We assume that each deployment of MultiResilience requires an upgrade to the RaaS control system at a cost £50,000each. This leads to benefits of £13.9M for NPg, scaled up to £27.8M for NPg andSSEN and £106.9M for all DNOs.
These benefits have been explored through sensitivity analysis, through consideration of different DFES, and by varying the costs of deploying the control systems and the achievable reduction in resilience service fees. The highest calculated benefit is £235.0M, and the lowest is £42.8M. In general, these estimates are conservative, and in practice it is very possible that MultiResilience could be deployed at an even greater scale than assumed here.
The implementation of MultiResilience will increase the access for DERs in the LV networks to revenues associated with resilience services, which will help increase the business case and profitability of small DERs throughout the country. This will also further promote the concept of local energy empowerment and sovereignty from by projects like Community DSO and project LEO-N.
Finally, combining DERs from different voltage levels for resilience might lead to lower volumes of expected energy not served, fewer customer interruptions and shorter durations of customer minutes lost. All these potential benefits will be explored and quantified in more detail through the delivery of the Beta project.