Make it easy to connect to and use the electricity network
In this section, you can find information on another of our stakeholders’ key priorities; making it easy to connect to and use the electricity network. Read about our stakeholders’ appetite for simpler connection processes and what investment could be required to facilitate connecting new demand and generation, as well as how we plan to become a truly customer-centric business.
Customers want us to improve our customer service around connections and network outages. You also want us to predict our charges more accurately.
We’re aiming to make it easier for our customers to connect to and use our network by becoming a more customer-centric business.
What you can find in this chapter
1. What this stakeholder priority is about
2. Our activities and current performance
3. What our stakeholders are telling us
4. Our proposals for the T2 period
5. How we will deliver
6. Our proposed costs for the T2 period and impact on consumer bill
7. How we will manage risk and uncertainty
8. Next steps
We estimate we will spend £479m on this priority over the next five years, in our baseline draft plan. £125m of this relates to the connection charges part of excluded services that do not impact on the consumer bill.
As a result, we estimate the impact of this chapter on the average annual household bill is 12p.
We've worked with other energy companies in building our draft plan to identify whole system solutions for consumers. This has reduced our baseline proposals by £199m for this priority.
In the common energy scenario, we estimate we will connect new generation customers providing 17.3 gigawatts of power onto our transmission network over five years.
We estimate that 73% of this power will come from renewable sources, technologies that optimise the use of renewable energy and from interconnectors that allow renewable energy to be imported from other countries.
For our direct demand customers, we estimate we will invest in 18 supergrid transformers in the common energy scenario.
We'll invest in the systems and people to develop more tailored services and improved customer experiences for you when you connect to the network. And we will continue to embed our customer focus throughout our business.
We'll develop incentives for our final business plan for us to deliver even better services where our customers value them.
We’ll improve your experience of us accessing the network. This will allow us to carry out vital work on the network with the least disruption to your business.
We'll seek to improve the stability and predictability of our charges to you through smoothing the adjustments we make to our revenues. This will involve us working with Ofgem.
Our outputs for this priority mean we can help to reduce wholesale electricity costs for consumers by linking up new generators to the network more quickly and efficiently.
We'll help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by connecting low-carbon generators, benefiting future consumers.
We'll improve our customers’ experience by more effectively meeting their needs, which will make the whole electricity system run more smoothly and at lower cost for consumers.
Your feedback matters
Your feedback on our draft business plan is important to us. We want to make sure we take account of a broad range of views as we develop our plan.
You can download our full draft business plan, or just this chapter here.