The UK Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) requested a centralised, reliable view of UK power cuts after the severe 2021/22 storms caused widespread, sustained loss of electricity supplies.
DESNZ instructed the Energy Networks Association (ENA) to investigate creating a national dashboard for a single view for government and ministers. The ENA commissioned Arup to provide a digital discovery, develop a proof of concept, and procurement support for an enduring solution of the National Energy Outage Platform (NEOP).
Arup worked with the six UK Distributions Network Operators (DNOs) to define and agree a common power-cut data schema and supported them in surfacing this data. We created a proof-of-concept dashboard to test functionality and data pipeline resilience, and worked closely with the ENA in planning and managing the procurement event for the enduring solution.
This project supports the UK government’s drive to improve the energy‑network resilience, response and communications before, during and after storms. Our design and delivery of NEOP was to give the government rapid access to live national power‑cut data, improving decision‑making in storm events. Our work has established the foundations for a cost‑effective, scalable and future‑proofed solution.
Putting data at the heart of the scheme
Our team provided strategic guidance and specialist sector knowledge to the project. This included supporting ENA in defining the goals and objectives of the project and working with each DNO to ensure that the project scope could be supported by their operational asset data requirements.
We worked closely with key stakeholders, from electricity network operators and government, to define a set of functional and non-functional requirements for the project. And we delivered a series of workshops with data specialists from the DNOs to discover what data was currently available, what could be made available and how it could be surfaced. Based on the outcome of these workshops we created a common data schema that would meet the projects requirements while also being compatible with technical and governance practices of the DNOs.
We supported the DNOs in making data available via a dedicated portal ensuring it complied with the schema.
Designing a flexible and scalable dashboard
During the discovery phase of the project, it was agreed that a proof-of-concept dashboard would help the ENA explore what can be achieved with the available data to stimulate discussion about the functionality of the final system.
During the proof-of-concept development, it also acted as a focal point for the alignment of data sets, enabling the testing of the flow of data during a winter storm season.
We created a flexible and scalable dashboard to display summary data about the total number of current power cuts, with the option to delve deeper with configurable charts and maps. The functionality of the dashboard hosted on Arup’s FUSE platform has been refined based on user feedback and will provide a template for the enduring solution.
Arup worked with the ENA to design a compliant process for the procurement of an enduring NEOP platform. This included writing tender documents, ensuring that the procurement was advertised correctly and managing responses.
