TABLE OF CONTENTS The need to rethink the UK's electricity network to accommodate local energy projects was already exercising the minds of the industry at the start of the new century. In 2001 Callum McCarthy, then chief executive of the regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), said that government targets on renewables and CHP would require the biggest revolution in the distribution network for 50 years. He told distribution network operators (DNOs) they must 'bring these issues to the top of the senior management agenda' and said that for Ofgem, too, it was 'emphatically not business as usual'.
'Today a DNO might have 300 embedded generators within its entire network. If the government's targets are to be met, by 2010 a DNO could have 300 generators connected to every substation,' McCarthy said.
Even then, he said, meeting the 2010 targets 10 per cent renewable generation and 10 GW of CHP would require 3 000 new renewable installations, 1 000 CHP plants and up to 3 million domestic CHP installations.
Technically, passive local networks would have to become active managers and, financially, DNO investment planning would be more demanding and take on more commercial dimensions.
In 2003 the government set out a strategy for developing the energy sector, in a White Paper titled Our Energy Future, that would give local energy projects and microgeneration an important role in the UK's energy provision. It said,
We envisage the energy system in 2020 being much...
