Innovation

Innovation

Smart Street

Our Smart Street project trialled innovative voltage control techniques to enable our networks and customers’ appliances to perform more efficiently and make it easier to adopt low carbon technologies onto the electricity network.

Starting in 2020, we will install Smart Street technology at 180 distribution substations over a three-year period, targeting areas with a high uptake of low carbon technologies, particularly where these overlap areas of fuel poverty. This will bring benefits for up to 45,000 customers, reducing electricity consumption by 5-8% per year. In the longer term this rollout will save a massive 143,860 tonnes of carbon between now and 2050, the same as removing 2,570 cars from our roads every year.

Find out more about Smart Street.

CLASS

Our CLASS project successfully demonstrated that by installing cutting edge voltage controllers in our primary substations we can reduce demand for electricity at peak times and defer reinforcement.

Since the successful completion of the project in 2015, we have rolled out CLASS technology to 260 primary substations across the North West, benefiting 1.7 million of our customers. We are now able to provide ‘balancing services’ to National Grid, helping them to balance supply and demand for the whole of Great Britain.

This ground-breaking approach can be used to help balance electricity supply and demand for the whole of Great Britain and brings a number of other advantages:

• Makes it easier to adopt low carbon technologies onto the electricity network such as wind and solar power
• Avoids or defers the cost and disruption of expanding our network of overhead lines, underground cables and substations
• Reduces costs for all electricity customers
• Can be rolled out on a national level.

CLASS could save customers in the North West around £100 million over the next 25 years – and £300 million across Great Britain.

Find out more about CLASS.

Find out about our innovation strategy and all our innovation projects.