Following the publication of the five RIIO-3 Innovation Challenges, we are welcoming early engagement from innovators with ideas or solutions that could help address them.
The innovation delivery groups will shape and prioritise activity and opportunities under each challenge over the coming months. However, innovators can begin engaging now where they have ideas or solutions that align with the published challenges (and the innovation priorities identified).
The Energy Innovation Centre (EIC) team has over 200 years of collective industry experience and can provide initial feedback on ideas, support proposition development, help assess alignment with the challenges, signpost to relevant funding routes and facilitate engagement with energy networks where appropriate. Where appropriate, the EIC will liaise with Ofgem, UKRI and relevant stakeholders to ensure effective industry coordination.
Please submit the SIF Challenge Triage Form at the bottom of this page. If you need any help, please contact us.
Net zero interruptions via autonomous reconfiguring and islanding of any section of the network by 2038.
Overview
Great Britain’s infrastructure faces a new era of risk from extreme climate events, economic shocks and sophisticated hybrid warfare.
This challenge aspires to redefine resilience as maintaining delivery of services to customers, without the assumption that this requires protection of physical energy network integrity. When a fault, cyberattack or other bad-actor incursion occurs, the network will have the capability to autonomously detect, respond and act in the most appropriate way.
This transforms energy networks from rigid, fragile structures into a dynamic platform capable of maintaining critical national infrastructure and services like water, hospitals, telecommunications and data centres without human intervention.
Autonomous response includes the capability to operate energy system ‘islands’, dynamically reconfiguring energy supply into self-contained zones at the level of households, streets, cities or industrial clusters, which can stay operational using their own energy storage and production resources – both grid-scale and behind-the-meter on demand sites.
These islands may be electrically separate from the wider power grid, but are more likely to retain connection to the wider gas system. This allows distributed gas system assets to play a pivotal role in collaboratively protecting energy services while optimising system-level outcomes, complementing local renewable power generation and storage. The role and potential of decarbonised gases will be increasingly significant in delivering clean energy continuity. Use of these islands will be aligned to and support national Black Start processes for electricity, including the Distribution Restoration Zones introduced in the revised Electricity System Restoration
Standard. Notwithstanding the different characteristics of different vectors, the underlying drive to minimise interruptions is valid and valuable for all.
Benchmarks in the telecommunications sector demonstrate that replacing manual oversight with a ‘scalable management framework’ can reduce network management operational expenditure by at least 20% while slashing service response times from 90 hours to just 90 minutes. Similarly, international research into direct current (DC) microgrids has shown that autonomous ‘islanding’ can maintain 100% reliability for
critical loads even during a total failure of the wider distribution grid.
System resilience is also a key deterrent of bad actors aiming to disrupt the country’s energy systems and economy. The quickest recovery time or least disruption can be a powerful tool in making Great Britain less attractive to attacks and ransom hunters.
Potential Prize
- Lower maintenance costs
- Greater resilience to growing outside threats
- Support innovation by providing a stable and flexible platform for new technologies, markets and customer services
- Limiting impact of, and acting as a deterrent to, outside threats
- Protection of critical national infrastructure, services and vulnerable people
- Less economic disruption.
Challenge Ambition
- Near-Zero Interruptions: An ambitious but realistic aim, especially for rural areas where power islanding and network monitoring may be more difficult. Sub-second autonomous reconfiguration is a technical necessity for a digitalised economy to remove the ‘single point of failure’ risks underscored by recent major infrastructure incidents
- Islanding: This approach aligns with the NESO system restoration plan. Greater deployment of distributed energy resources and their mutual visibility and coordination will enable local self-sufficiency of energy needs across broader regions of the network
- Delivery Year: 2038 represents a ten-year horizon to deploy the necessary Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) hardware and the cyber-defence AI required to handle complex, bidirectional flows, as well as the deployment of local grid-forming assets through the 2030-2040 period.
Necessary Partnerships
- System Operation: Coordination between control rooms across all network types will be required, led by NESO to define the architecture for handovers from national to local, and from vector to vector. Support from organisations engaged in the field of transmission-level islanding
- Cross-Vector Collaboration: Coordinated planning at local levels between electricity and gas networks to iteratively define region boundaries and asset portfolios available to support islanded operation
- Security & Resilience: Innovative partnerships with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and cross-sector utility operators (water and telecoms) to mitigate cascading failures during system stress
- Technology Companies: Harnessing the full potential of deep tech solutions for predictive analysis, sensing, automation, and decision-making during islanding.
Innovation Opportunities
- Development of digital and AI systems to support autonomous network operation
- Combining self-sustaining islands with network rerouting/reconfiguration
- Islanding ability at home/street/local area/regional scales
- Dynamic coordination with distributed energy resources
- Cross-vector resilience strategies, including visibility and coordination post-fault
- Definitions of resilience focussing on maintenance of customer services in relation to their criticality
- Rights of energy stakeholders and consumer protections under islanded operation
- Redefinition of networks’ roles to support effective delivery
- Improved bio-methane purification strategies to enable broader asset availability
- Cross-vector network architectures to enable local operation without connection to higher pressure tiers/voltage levels
- Business models for strategic energy reserve operation at national and local levels
- Innovation of assets to withstand prolonged extreme weather events.
Case Study: Residential Batteries for Zero Upfront Cost
On 24 February 2022, Ukrainian grid operators happened to be conducting a planned isolation test, deliberately de-linking from the Russian power system for a trial intended to last just a few days.
When Russia invaded that same day, the two grids were never reconnected.
Ukraine’s grid operated in isolation until 16 March 2022, when it was successfully synchronised with the Continental European grid. This synchronisation had been planned for 2023 but was expedited with ‘a
year’s work in two weeks’.
Ukraine’s response to Russian attacks on its infrastructure has been to pivot dramatically to distributed generation and localised resilience. The country has deployed additional generators to support supply to
key services such as hospitals, and created 10,676 ‘points of invincibility’ providing heat and power to citizens affected by disruption. Meanwhile, an estimated 1.5 GW of new solar capacity was added in 2025 alone, and a 200 MW/400 MWh battery storage system was delivered and remotely commissioned in six months rather than the typical two years – in the power system of a country at war.