Speaking to Utility Week, the firm’s senior vice president of international business Andrew Jones said: “There are technologies that have already been proven, but the challenge is: how do they get commercialised quickly enough that they don’t just keep doing demonstration projects?”
He added that “a lot more work is needed” by suppliers and customers in “working together” to make sure new technologies can be rolled out.
“If you talk to , there are two general responses,” he said. “One is: ‘ok, it works, but I don’t know if this gives us a return’, because it’s solving a problem that they’re not sure how big a problem it will be in the future. There is a lot more modelling and economic studies required for them to change.
“The second one is 99 per cent of the people that work for a DNO are dealing with today’s problem which were created by yesterday’s decisions, only 1 per cent is worrying about what tomorrow’s problem is going to be. If they take a new technology, who’s there to actually champion it and get it rolled out.”
The Institution of Engineering and Technology warned last week that the transmission and distribution companies must “fully understand” the technical implications of moving to a low-carbon system to ensure the future electricity network is resilient.
The Institution released a report saying that failure to address modelling and input data gaps in current power system analysis tools for electric vehicles, heat pumps, demand side management, solar generation and all types of energy storage could have “serious consequences” for the delivery of low-carbon targets.