Northern Powergrid's potential future scenarios as interpreted from the 2019 National Grid Future Energy Scenarios.
The scenarios displayed have been generated by disaggregation of the National Grid Future Energy Scenarios performed by Element Energy on behalf of Northern Powergrid, which gives values for each of the modelled parameters down to each of Northern Powergrid's primary substations.
This disaggregation process involves a regionally-specific allocation of the data; as a result, the data published may deviate from that within National Grid's Future Energy Scenarios publication. These scenarios represent different possible future worlds but should not be used as a prescriptive forecast; Northern Powergrid and Element Energy accept no responsibility for the use of this data.
For this visualisation we have created geographies (polygons) for each Primary substation in Northern Powergrid's network. We chose to use Output Areas (2011) as these are the building blocks of census geography as used by the Office of National Statistics. We have used customer postcodes to identify each Output Area supplied by each Primary substation. Output Areas with fewer than 10 customers connected to a Primary substation were excluded. This helped with anonymisation and also reduced data issues in the customer database e.g. incorrect customer postcodes. We construct representative geographies for each Primary substation from the remaining Output Areas. In cases where multiple Primary substations serve the same Output Area, that Output Area is assigned to the Primary substation that serves the most customers there.
Some Primary substation geographies may show larger areas on the map than they cover in practice particularly in rural areas where network connectivity may be concentrated in specific parts of an Output Area. The areas shown here are representative for the purpose of showing the Future Energy Scenario model data and should not be relied upon for checking connectivity or to assess the terms of connection for specific premises.
The model predictions have been created by Primary substation and that is the definitive view. The Local Authority view is constructed from the Primary substation values. We have found the proportion of a Primary substation's customers in each Local Authority district (as defined in April 2019) by adding up the customers in each Output Area belonging to a specific Local Authority district. For some parameters (e.g. electric vehicles) the values from the Primary substations are apportioned to each Local Authority District and then summated into totals. For values which can't be summated (e.g. Peak demand) we have shown the maximum value for any Primary substation that serves a Local Authority. For Local Authorities which are only partially in Northern Powergrid areas the model only produces forecasts for the area served by Northern Powergrid, so it is not a total Local Authority forecast. Examples of these Local Authorities partially served by Northern Powergrid include Bassetlaw, East Lindsey, High Peak, North East Derbyshire, North East Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Pendle, West Lindsey. There are some additional major sites situated within a Local Authority area which distribute into many Local Authority areas and which may have further direct connections for large wind, solar and other generation. Data for these Grid Supply Points (connection points between the GB transmission network and Northern Powergrid’s distribution network) and Bulk Supply Points (connection points on NPg's network which are fed from the Grid Supply Points and supply the primary substations) can also be downloaded from Data Mill North.
The full set of data files can be found on Data Mill North. The Primary substation data files that power this visualisation are stored with this repository on Github.