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Background

This section is the context every other page assumes: NGED's electricity network, what NGED has asked for, how distribution network operators have traditionally forecast, and the two limits — measurement artefacts in the telemetry and a fragmented literature — that shape the rest of the design. It also holds two pages of Great Britain battery and price background for the battery study. Design philosophy states the principles that answer to this problem; architecture describes what is built to solve it.

  • NGED's network and its data — the primary substations, bulk supply points, and grid supply points NGED operates, the generation connected to them, and the false zeros, stuck values, missing-data gaps, and months-long commissioning ramps in the trial-area telemetry.
  • Weather products surveyed for the weather-product studies — which weather products the project uses, and the forecast models, reanalyses, and satellite retrievals that could join the weather-product studies, with what each carries. A survey, not a list of what the project will ingest.
  • Requirements — the phased rollout from 32 time series to roughly 2,500, and the objectives NGED prioritises.
  • The manual heuristic forecast — the historical-analogue method that, until recently, was the normal approach among distribution network operators, with no weather model and no machine learning, and the baseline our own forecasts are measured against.
  • Switching events — why NGED's meshed network is operated as a radial tree, and why reconfiguring that tree moves load between substations without warning.
  • How GB batteries schedule themselves — what a battery's charging and discharging follows, which of its decisions are visible in public data, and what must be inferred.
  • GB electricity prices: which are free and when each is known — which GB prices are free to download, when each becomes known, and how predictable the prices are.
  • The state of the art in energy forecasting — what the published literature does and does not settle, and where Flexpectation's plan sits against it.