Introduction
In my previous blog, ‘Hotter and Hotter’, I explored how a summer heatwave exposed the growing complexity of Britain’s electricity network. Behind every NESO alert lies an extraordinary balancing act between generation, demand, and an ever-expanding number of connected technologies.
But complexity is only half the story. To understand today’s electricity system, we first need to understand something much more fundamental: everything is connected, and everything has a position—on the earth’s surface, or beneath it, or above it.
Why I’ve Always Loved Maps
I’ve always been fascinated by maps. As a child, my world was defined by a mental map that included the sweet shop, my friends’ homes, the playing field with the enormous banana slide, the heavy horses, and the footpaths leading to the sea. Those places formed my first mental map. Not everyone “gets” maps in quite the same way—for me, they’re a combination of science, maths and artistry.
That fascination became a career: first in surveying, cartography, remote sensing, statistics and computer science (every graphics and statistics module I could get my hands on), then into Geographic Information Systems long before we called it GIS, and eventually into consultancy in the energy and utilities sector. So you’ll have to forgive the obsession with all things spatial. Humans have always relied on understanding location and how things relate to one another. The principle hasn’t changed—only the complexity has.
The Ultimate Connected Network
Today’s electricity network is one of the most geographically complex systems ever built. It connects traditional generation, offshore wind, solar, battery storage, nuclear, interconnectors, electric vehicles, heat pumps and millions of homes and businesses. Every new connection changes how the network behaves.
The network operates dynamically down to the millisecond, while the physical network itself is far from static—with new connections and decommissions accounting for roughly 15% of the network in a typical 12 months, and the low-voltage (LV) network becoming increasingly complex and least understood of all. Are we exploiting all the data available to innovate and unlock that value? I don’t think we are—not yet.
Networks Drive Society
Infrastructure networks—roads, railways, communications, internet cables, water, gas and electricity—are the foundation of modern society. They overlap geographically and increasingly depend on one another. The challenge is no longer collecting data; it’s connecting it, and turning that connection into the insight an engineering-led business needs to serve its customers.
Everything Really Is Connected
You may remember the rather unfortunate tale from my previous blog, about our part-time neighbour who decided that the hottest day of the year was the perfect time to burn a substantial pile of garden waste beneath a dead tree.
The fire spread beyond his property and threatened a pole-mounted transformer, leaving our village briefly without power during the Wimbledon final. As engineers made the network safe, we quickly discovered just how interconnected modern infrastructure has become. No electricity meant the local telecommunications tower shut down. Broadband disappeared, mobile coverage became patchy, and the local water company had to monitor pumping operations, because parts of the water network rely on electrically powered pumping stations and remote telemetry.
What began as a simple garden fire became a powerful reminder that electricity underpins almost everything else. When one network is disrupted, the effects rarely stop at its own boundaries.
Why Interconnection Matters
The UK imports and exports electricity every day through interconnectors with neighbouring countries. They improve resilience, support energy trading and help balance supply and demand. Connectivity is one of the strengths of a modern electricity system—building insight at a local level is just as important as building it at a national and international level.
Seeing the Whole Network
The transition from Distribution Network Operators to Distribution System Operators requires a different perspective. Operators must understand electrical performance, asset health, customer demand, environmental impact, operational resilience and financial performance across entire networks—not just individual assets.
The Challenge Beneath the Surface
Many utilities still manage information in organisational silos: OT, SCADA, GIS, Enterprise Asset Management, Work Management, ERP and customer systems. Each is valuable in its own right, and point-to-point integrations get built where absolutely necessary—but few utilities have a complete operational picture linking asset and network performance through to investment, risk and scenario planning. The data often exists (there are issues here, and we’ll get into them next time); the insight often does not.
Why This Matters
Maps have evolved from static records into intelligent digital models of the network. The next evolution is using AI to help interpret those connected models, giving engineers better information on which to make informed decisions. AI is only as good as the connected understanding of the network beneath it—which is exactly why, on the Apexon side of my day job, so much of our effort with utility clients goes into the unglamorous work of connecting that data before anyone talks about algorithms.
Coming Next…
In Blog 3 – ‘Seeing the Whole Network: Escaping the Legacy Data Silo’ we’ll explore why utilities often possess decades of valuable operational knowledge, yet struggle to bring it together into a single trusted view that supports better decision making.
