How can Utility Network owners adapt to the ‘New Normal’

As a multi-utility network owner and operator, Leep Utilities is responsible for the adoption of electricity, gas, water, wastewater, and heat networks across the UK. Having successfully navigated the pandemic, our Director of Operations, considers what this ‘new normal’ might look like for utility network owners:

Throughout lockdown, Leep worked hard to continue providing our essential services and protect customers, all whilst navigating the constantly changing landscape.

On a practical level, the rapid shift to home working meant that many of our commercial sites would be sitting empty and we used this as opportunity to bring forward planned maintenance. Whilst not a radical move, in the long run the benefit to our customers will be significant. They will not need to work round the inevitable short-term outage that takes place because of routine maintenance work.

With an increasing number of people working from home, it was important to ensure we had the operational resources available to resolve any domestic issues promptly. Before lockdown was announced, our IT department was hard at work ensuring that our entire team would be in a position where they were able to work remotely. It was important to us that our customer service team would be able to deliver the same exceptional service from the safety of their own homes.

Whilst as a business we hope to return to the office, once it is safe enough to do so, we have found that some of the challenges we have faced in the past few months have resulted in us considering  new ways of working.

Leep has always prided itself on being a dynamic and highly adaptable business, and this was a huge asset as we looked to adapt our business model to work in line with government restrictions.

Our project managers and other field-based staff previously spent substantial amounts of time on site; the temporary closure of construction sites and implementation of social distancing measures, forced the team to find innovative new ways to monitor ongoing projects.

Whilst it will never fully replace spending time on site, we have found using photo and video evidence to be an efficient way to monitor progress, in the short term. This is something we hope to incorporate more widely moving forward. Not only will this free up time for our team, but we hope will make the process more straightforward for the ICPs we work with.

Something that the pandemic has brought into focus is the need for the industry to rethink its relationship with risk. A zero-risk approach is no longer appropriate, and it is important that utility providers are offering innovative solutions to problems rather than implementing a one-size fits all approach.

The world is changing for asset owners and challenges are become more diverse. As a last-mile utility operator, Leep is the last piece in the puzzle – serving the development and dealing directly with customers.

Currently, a big focus for us is considering what we can do to ensure that every development we work on is futureproofed. The push towards green energy, increasing popularity of electric vehicles and the need to deliver low carbon heating by 2025 will all impact the ‘new normal’.

At Leep, our team works closely with developers to ensure that the decisions they are making in 2020 will not impact the network’s ability to function effectively in the future. We are looking 10 – 15 years ahead to ensure that every network going live today will have the capacity to scale up.

The pandemic is a good example of how crucial this foresight can be. Lockdown and remote working challenged 50 years of data surrounding domestic household electricity consumption. Whilst, as a business, we had already recognised that usage trends were changing, the speed at which this shift happened could not have been predicted.

The ‘new normal’ is going to bring with it a range of challenges for both domestic and commercial developers. Planned changes to current regulations will need to be implemented within an industry that looks quite different to how it did this time last year.

Whilst this can at times be daunting, Leep is meeting these challenges with the innovation and dynamism that runs through the business to its core.