Way forward
The ETYS is the ESO’s view of how the future transmission system requirements will be met. Currently, this focuses mainly on bulk power transfer requirements, particularly during winter-peak conditions.
As operation of the National Electricity Transmission System (NETS) becomes increasingly complex, we need new ways to identify weak points to address in the network planning process. This will involve the use of innovative analysis techniques, such as our work on year-round probabilistic analysis, and looking at the NOA pathfinders to see how we can better address both voltage and stability issues. This could lead to more informed network investment and operational planning decisions.
Year-round probabilistic analysis
We continue to develop our probabilistic analysis tools to analyse year-round system conditions. This will allow us to assess more snapshots and identify system needs that could arise from a range of generation and demand conditions.
This year we committed in our ETYS consultation to present our probabilistic tool developments in a separate publication. This will allow us to focus more on the probabilistic methodology and its potential use outside of our license requirements for the ETYS publication and allow the ETYS to focus on communicating system needs.
We will look at year-round network performance and requirements and demonstrate the new functionality added to our tool during the past year. The report will give more detailed insight into our analysis and updates on related innovation projects. We will also present our findings alongside a clear vision for their use cases and potential integration within the ETYS and NOA processes.
We intend to publish this new document in the first quarter of 2022.
NOA Pathfinder projects
The ETYS is looking to expand its view of system needs, informed by the NOA pathfinders. The road to determining the future network capability requirements and opportunities needs to be constantly refined and developed.
One of the ways we do this is through the NOA pathfinders.
These investigate specific network requirements and open the network development to a wider range of participants, both regionally and nationally.
The future development of the ETYS and NOA will be shaped by the NOA pathfinder projects which aim to resolve additional challenges related to thermal, high voltage and stability constraints.
In June we published our annual voltage screening report identifying areas that could have future high voltage system needs. We are now carrying out more detailed analysis to quantify the requirements.
