OpenLV
The OpenLV project has now closed and this website will no longer be updated. Please email all project enquiries to: wpdinnovation@westernpower.co.uk or visit Western Power Distribution Innovation projects website.
The OpenLV project has now closed and this website will no longer be updated. Please email all project enquiries to: wpdinnovation@westernpower.co.uk or visit Western Power Distribution Innovation projects website.
The OpenLV trials have finished and learning from the project is now being shared. Please see links to the latest project learning materials below and in our ‘End of Project Material‘ section.
The project team conducted desktop surveys of 149,000 substations
Approximately 400 substations were surveyed in person
51 community organisations responded to initial survey
45 app ideas suggested by community organisations in initial survey
7 community organisations selected to participate in community trial
4 substations monitored in one village, covering the whole of Marshfield
79 organisations expressed an interest in the business and academia element of the project
6 third party apps developed
4 academic papers submitted using data provided by the OpenLV project
1 hardware system developed by third party
Approximately 15 million data points captured by the project per day across the 80 project sites
That equates to approximately 10,000 data points per minute
Or approximately 5.5 billion data points in a year
WHG
Rooftops
Marshfield
Owen Square
Tamar
Marshfield
Marshfield
Marshfield
Exeter
Fairway Substation
Electricity comes from power stations via the high voltage electricity network (‘the motorway’) and then gets ‘transformed’ to lower voltage at substations before coming into people’s homes via the ‘local’ low voltage electricity network (‘the A & B roads’).
Approximately 800,000 kilometres, or half a million miles, of overhead and underground power lines make up the low voltage distribution networks in Britain (more than the distance to the moon and back).
There are approximately 230,000 ground-mounted distribution substations nationally. In addition there are approximately 349,000 pole-mounted transformers (these are ‘mini-substations’). So there are around 579,000 ‘substations’ in total.
Feeders carry electricity from substations to our homes. Great Britain has about a million low voltage feeders. The pole-mounted transformers tend to supply one feeder (but sometimes two), and the ground-mounted distribution substations supply 3 – 4 feeders on average, but in urban areas this could be as high as 10 or 11.
The basic units for measuring electric power are watts, kilowatts (1,000 watts) and megawatts (one million watts).
Energy from electricity is generally measured in kilowatt hours, megawatt hours and gigawatt hours (kWh, MWh and GWh).
A kWh equates to the use of 1,000 watts of electricity for a full hour, or ten 100 watt light bulbs all lit for a full hour.
A MWh equals 1,000 kilowatt hours – enough to supply the average power requirement for around 2,000 homes for an hour.
The average household uses around 3,300 kWhs of electricity per year.
The WPD Electricity Network delivers power to 7.8 million customers over a service area of 34,000 miles or 55,000 sq km.
