Project FALCON
SGC have been delighted to working closely in conjunction with Western Power Distribution for almost three years in the delivery of Project FALCON.
This is an Ofgem funded innovation project.
FALCON has operated live system trials to test six alternatives to conventional network reinforcement methods, to assess effectiveness, see how they work in practice, establish likely costs and generate new learning about how these can be rolled out across the networks in the future. An innovative new communications network allowed these to be controlled and all the resulting performance data, captured to ensure that our energy models reflect real world performance.
Four of these options are based around engineering approaches that will involve modifications to the network itself:
- Dynamic Asset Ratings
- Meshed Networks
- Automatic Load Transfer
- Storage
The remaining two options were Commercial Techniques, which focussed on consumer behaviour and was the sole responsibility of SGC to design, build, operate and report back on, as we are also responsible for the Knowledge Management across the entire project. These provided opportunities for participants in the Milton Keynes trial area to receive an incentive for changing their behaviour for a short period of time. This is commonly known as a Demand Side Response (DSR). The two approaches to achieving the desired behavioural change are by:
- Reducing load by stopping, or deferring consumption
- Starting or increasing generation reduce load and / or export to the 11kV network
The operational element of the trials concluded at the end of February and we have been busy since then compiling the analysis into a report that will be published at the end of the summer.
If you are interested in receiving a copy of the results please drop an email to ggswandells9@westernpower.co.uk to be added to the circulation list.