What is Respond?
What is Respond?
Respond has delivered a revolutionary approach to managing fault current – the instantaneous surge of energy which occurs under fault conditions.
Increased demand and the connection of more generation to the electricity network will cause an increase in ‘fault level’ – the maximum amount of potential ‘fault current’.
Although we install protection equipment to safeguard the network from damage that could be caused by fault current, if fault level rises above the rating of our protection equipment, we have to replace it with higher rated equipment.
Respond’s intelligent software, the ‘fault level assessment tool’, uses network data to predict fault level in near real time.
When fault level approaches or rises above our equipment ratings, the tool will ‘enable’ or ‘disable’ one of three innovative fault level mitigation techniques designed to manage fault current safely:
- Adaptive protection
- IS-limiter
- Fault current limiting service.
Find out more about the different techniques deployed in the Respond trials.
The £5.5 million Respond project will benefit all electricity customers in the long term by helping us to avoid or defer traditional, expensive and disruptive reinforcement solutions. This will help keep costs down for customers, reduce carbon emissions and allow us to connect low carbon technologies much more quickly.
The project ran from January 2015 until October 2018.