Embedded Capacity Register

Data is vital for decarbonisation

Why?

Because information on electricity usage, demographics, socio-economic circumstances, and climate tells us so much. They can point us in the direction of where best to locate new network assets, where relative deprivation may coincide with a colder climate, where there’s scope to locate more community renewable generation, or where there’s extra capacity ready to support low carbon technologies. All of these can influence good network planning and deliver tangible benefits for the communities we serve.

Data's vital role in shaping decarbonised electricity networks means we’re always looking for ways to understand data better, so we can better harness its powers and the opportunities it presents us.

SSEN’s ‘Embedded Capacity Register’ - or ECR - is one tool helping us do this. It’s part of our data portal, and it provides details about site-specific generation and storage resources which have a capacity of 50kW or above. These are resources that are either currently connected - or have accepted to connect - to one of SSEN’s two electricity distribution networks in the north of Scotland or central southern England.

The details on the register include the address of each site, the agreed capacity of what it’s permitted to generate, and the technology type – for example solar, hydro, or wind.

Following our most recent efforts to enhance our Open Data Portal, we took the opportunity to highlight these improvements, by demonstrating the ECR’s benefits during the latest of our series of data surgeries. We took users through how the register works, the data on offer to them, and how it can be effectively applied.

Our reasons for doing this were to capture users’ feedback on how easy the tool was to use, and to canvass their views for how it could be further developed and improved. It was also a chance for us to pick up on any issues they spotted around data quality and for us to hear how they were using the data.

Armed with some great feedback on what’s important to users, and with insights on what they want to see in the ECR, and their suggestions about how it works, we’ve now got good ideas for how to move forward to make the data portal even more useful.

We’ll add more data items that portal users suggested would be useful to them. And we've also undertaken to further finesse the quality and accuracy of the published data – this is an ongoing process which will deliver regular improvements.

You can access the ECR from our Data Portal, and gain access to the data via a downloadable spreadsheet, or via an interactive map.