In the months since a series of storms battered the North West, Electricity North West have been working to ensure that large-scale blackouts on the same scale do not happen again.

Martin Deehan, operations manager for its northern division, is responsible for everywhere from central Lancashire upwards.

He discusses the legacy impact of the December floods, and the firm’s plans for the future, as part of our “10 minutes with...” series.


So who is Martin Deehan?

“I’m the operation director for the north region of Electricity North West and that covers central Lancashire right up to the Scottish borders.

“I’m responsible for all of the networking we’ve got which is from the 132,000 voltage high voltage network to the low voltage network that supplies all of our customers in the two counties.

“In total, there’s 1 million customers in the area with quite a diversity across the area, if you think about the central Lancashire belt, it’s quite an urban network and then there’s the extremes of rural Cumbria where we have customers who are quite spread out.

“We have to cope with those challenges and everything that comes with them from trying to maintain the network provide new connections and deal with the faults that inevitably happen.”


New systems at Electricity North West

“We’re bringing in a new system to help manage our network and that will effectively, manoeuvre our system more towards a smart grid and that’s really important.

“As the nature of people’s use of electricity changes, the network must adapt to that and that’s what we’re doing.

“So you’ve got things like electric vehicles which are becoming more prevalent on the network, customers who generate their own electricity and export their own power too.

“The network was originally designed to provide a one way direction of power, from the power stations, through our network to the customer’s home and that’s very much changing now.”


The “dynamic network”

“It’s a dynamic network and you have to have a dynamic system which is going to help in the near future to make the grid smart.

“It can often be a difficult thing to do, to allow customers to connect to the grid, but we make it as easy as possible and that’s a big role that we play.

“It’s important because the whole nature of generation is changing, previously it was very large power station, which we do still have and rely upon.

“There is still the power station programme at Moorside which is likely to go ahead on the west coast of Cumbria but there’s an increasing number of what we call embedded generator station which can be wind turbines, or battery storage which are coming online now.

“We’ve got to facilitate those onto our network and its important to make sure we get them online.”


Moorside

“Moorside is a National Grid led development, but we’re making sure that we’re working closely with them on that.

“What is likely to happen for us is that we’ll be providing a lot of support to divert the existing network so that the new grid infrastructure can be put in and essentially we’re trying to make sure we work with them to ensure that we can remove our infrastructure and their infrastructure takes over.

“It’s less intrusive to our customers that we don’t have two networks and that’s an important part of it, and the super grid connection is essential to making sure that that power station can get its power into the grid.”


The future for Electricity North West

“We are the provider of electricity, and everyone receives their connection from us and our wires, we’ve got three new challenges to meet.

“We’ve got to be cost effective for our customers; we need to engage with our customers and understand what their requirements are and we have to provide a reliable power supply.

“One of the key aspects to meeting those challenges is innovation, how do we innovate the network and invest in things that can make the network smarter and sleeker as time goes on.

“We’ve been really successful and one of these particular innovations, which are often quite technical in nature, but we’ve developed a system of software that allows us to take power away from a fault and we can fix it.

“That innovation has allowed us to keep assets on the network longer than previously and that project has enabled us to make a 16 per cent saving on customer’s bills.”