Climate Action
Decarbonising Electricity, Heat and Transport: This pillar focuses on delivering the innovations that will ensure that ESB Networks cost-effectively delivers the right infrastructure at the right time for a decarbonised energy system supporting the integration of significantly increased levels of renewables and electrified heat and transport on the system.
The following outlines a selection of the projects undertaken by ESB Networks under the Climate Action pillar. The latest progress reports and close-out reports are available to view here also.
Smarter HV and MV Customer Connections – New Distribution Planning & Security of Supply Standards
The project reviewed the Distribution System Security and Planning Standards to establish how the standards needed to evolve to meet the changes in the electricity industry, whilst cost effectively maintaining a safe, secure and reliable distribution system. The new Standards, developed with significant collaboration and consultation with stakeholders and approved by the CRU are available to view here (PDF 1MB).
Heatmap Project
The aim of the Heatmap project is to provide an interactive map showing the available network capacity in terms of how much demand or generation could be added into a substation without reinforcement.
Intelligent Secondary Substation Transformer (Winter Peak)
Decarbonisation of the electrical network will see a significant impact on the Low Voltage (LV) network with the increasing integration of Low Carbon Technologies (LCTs) such as heat pumps, solar PV and Electric Vehicles. The effect on the LV network as a consequence of the integration of these new technologies is not yet fully understood. To gain valuable knowledge of these technologies, ESB Networks trialled a number of different innovative monitoring devices to fully understand what is required to effectively monitor the LV network.
New RoCoF settings for Distributed Generators
This project was a key enabler to ensure distributed generators are able to withstand system frequency changes driven by the increased amount of renewable generation connected to the network.
In order to operate the power system with up to 75% of the instantaneous power coming from non-synchronous sources new Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) relay settings are required for distributed generators. Failure to achieve this would have resulted in the ratio of non-synchronous generation on the system being capped at 60%, as opposed to the target of 75%.
Facilitation of Fast DS3 System Services
The provision of DS3 system services from Distribution Energy Resources (DER) ensures frequency and voltage stability on the transmission network. These system services or flexibility products are typically provided by existing generation and demand customers who are connected to the distribution network. This project entailed necessary learning, procedures, modelling and testing to enable the advance technical assessment by ESB Networks to detect any adverse impacts on distribution network planning or operations from the provision of DS3 System Services.
