Before you sign: the DNO Connection Agreement checks that really matter

00:00:00 – 00:00:16 – Pete Aston

So, welcome everyone, we’re going to make a start. Welcome to another Roadnight Taylor webinar; I’m Pete Aston, one of the engineers here at Roadnight Taylor, and I am excited to be joined by Catherine Cleary and Philip Bale, my colleagues. So, welcome, Catherine and Philip.

00:00:16 – 00:00:17 – Catherine Cleary

Thanks Pete.

00:00:17 – 00:00:57 – Pete Aston

We are very excited that you can join us, this morning, all the audience and give an hour of your time, we’re just a small consultancy so we can’t directly help as many developers as we’d really like to. So doing these webinars and podcasts is a really good way that we can help engage with the wider industry and help some of you navigate some of these sort of complex connection processes that we have in the industry.

So today we are going to be talking about connection agreements. So, I will attempt to share my screen. Is that now sharing? Catherine, Philip. You can see that? Good?

00:00:57 – 00:00:58 – Philip Bale

Yep.

00:00:59 – 00:02:16 – Pete Aston

Okay, great. So, so we are going to be looking at DNO connection agreement checks that really matter. Now I guess the reason we’re doing this now is that we’re hoping that there’s going to be a lot of DNO connections made over the next five to 10 years after sort of maybe a bit of a, a halt over the last few years whilst been sort of working through Connections Reform and so on.

So, so we hope this is sort of a timely webinar to start talking about sort of connection agreements and we are going to get stuck into that very shortly. We are going to sort of take questions, we want this to be interactive, so please use the Q&A function, and we will be monitoring that and trying to answer your questions as we go along but, we’ve only got an hour, so, so we’ll try to sort of answer as many questions as we can but possibly we won’t get through all of them, and we’re also going to have a poll, I think Laura in the background who’s running this is going to put a poll up. So, yeah, there’s, a couple of questions on the poll, so if you could answer those, and are we going to, are we going to show the answers to this at the end Laura? Laura’s maybe gone mute.

00:02:17 – 00:02:19 – Laura Porter

Yes, I don’t see why not; we can do that.

00:02:19 -00:02:20 – Pete Aston

Okay.

00:02:20 – 00:02:21 – Laura Porter

I’ll make that happen.

00:02:22 – 00:02:42 – Pete Aston

If we get time, thank you.

Right, let’s get stuck in, we’ll go to the first slide which is – what is a connection agreement? This is, we thought this was really a good place to start. So, Catherine, can we go over to you first? So, talk us through what is a connection agreement.

00:02:43 – 00:03:41 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, thanks Pete. So obviously, the connection agreement itself is separate to the connection offer. So, when people apply to connect to the, the network, the DNO writes them a connection offer, they do sign and accept that connection offer; so that connection offer does kind of form a, the basis of a kind of contractual agreement, but that connection offer effectively gets superseded when the generator or demand customer connects to the network by their connection agreement. So, the offer really just dealt with what do we need to do, what do we need to build, how much it’s going to cost to get you connected?

And then your connection agreement is the enduring legal contractual agreement between yourself and the DNO that gives you your rights to remain connected and puts in place any kind of restrictions on you or any responsibilities associated with that connection.

So, connection agreements are arguably even more important than connection offers because they might affect a site for the next 25 years. So, so the connection agreement is the enduring agreement, once the site is operational.

00:03:42 – 00:03:59 – Pete Aston

Okay and the title of today’s DNO connection agreements, but could you just very quickly, and this is very off script already, Catherine, give us, explain what the differences with the way it works at transmission? But the rest of it’ll be on distribution.

00:04:00 – 00:04:41 – Catherine Cleary

Yes, because we are going to focus today on distribution. And the reason is that transmission, this is, this is different; so at transmission, when you apply to NESO for a connection offer, what you actually get is your connection agreement. So yeah, bilateral connection, agreement. And that agreement doesn’t just cover what are we going to build for the network. It also covers your kind of operational enduring responsibilities. So, at transmission, it’s different because you get this piece of paper right up front and that is what you are reviewing when you’re accepting a, we call them connection offers, but they are in fact connection agreements at transmission.

So, distribution, separate process; and we have two separate things – a connection offer then superseded by a connection agreement. And I think that’s why we think it’s quite important to focus on distribution connection agreements, because perhaps they get a bit less airtime sometimes.

00:04:42 – 00:05:12 – Pete Aston

Fantastic. Thank you, Catherine. And as I said before, just in case we sort of others have joined in the meantime, if you want to put questions into the Q&A, we will attempt to answer them as we go through.

So, we’ll move on to the next bit then is sort of general things to check, Philip, sort of talk us through, we’re going to talk through lots of sort of specific points on some other slides in a bit, but what sort of general thing should we be checking Philip in connection agreements?

00:05:13 – 00:06:24 – Philip Bale

Yeah, good point Pete. So, obviously as Catherine said, the connection agreement supersedes the connection offer that comes out. So, the first thing is to go back to your connection offer and check your connection agreement and basically spot what’s changed. So, what’s changed from one to the other? Are the changes as expected? Are they in your interest, are they to your detriment? Some of which are mistakes, some of which may have just changed, and that will change your agreement with the DNO going forwards. So that would be the first thing, and we’ll go through and explain a few different elements in particular that we would go through and very much go through and check.

Also check the round changes since the offer. So, in some instances, the connection agreement will come six years after the connection offer was accepted and signed. So, is there any elements that were in the connection offer which have just been pulled across into the connection agreement that maybe don’t need to be there anymore?

And the last point is a general sense check. Is there anything in this longstanding contract between you and the network operator, that you weren’t expecting to be in there or is very different to what you’re expecting? Because ultimately when you sign it, this is your agreement between you and the DNO for the next 20, 25 or longer years?

00:06:25 – 00:06:52 – Pete Aston

Yeah. So, I guess Philip, there’s, there’s quite potentially, like you say, over a lifetime of having accepted a connection offer to, to actually get, getting connected could be a long time, like you said, 6, 7, 8 years, whatever, and in that time there, I guess there could have been quite a lot of sort of variations, formal variations to connection offers. So, there’s quite a history and, and you might not have the same DNO planner I guess as you started with.

00:06:53 – 00:06:56 – Philip Bale

It’s very rarely you have the same DNO care panel right away from the start to the end.

00:06:57 – 00:07:05 – Pete Aston

Yeah, so yeah, so, so there’s always that sort of risk of, of someone missing something on both sides. So, yeah…

00:07:06 – 00:07:19 – Philip Bale

I think also just to add to that, as you said, some DNOs will go through and vary the connection offer consistently. Some of the DNOs will vary things via emails, so you’ll have the original offer and then updates will happen fairly informally, and that can be very difficult to try and capture.

00:07:20 – 00:07:35 – Pete Aston

Yep, absolutely. Okay, so that’s some general bits to, to check. Let’s move on to some specifics. Now, Catherine, if we come over to you, capacity, this sort of feels like it shouldn’t be difficult.

00:07:36 – 00:11:07 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, getting the right it is kind of obvious, isn’t it? You know that it’s the first, it’s the first number that pretty much everyone will look for to make sure that your, your import capacity, your export capacities are what you are expecting. But it’s probably also the area we see the most errors creep in. So, there are a couple of really common errors and, and these are often simply sort of process errors. So, one thing that, that I think we’ll all stress throughout this webinar is that it’s very rare for a project to sign its first draft connection agreement; you are, you are issued with a draft and normally there will be some things that you need to go back and discuss with the DNO potentially get corrected, they’re completely amenable to that, you know, it’s in everyone’s interests that the connection agreement reflects what’s actually being built sort of accurately on the site.

So this isn’t a kind of a case of, oh, well, you know, if it doesn’t, if we don’t like what it says, tough, it’s definitely a case of actually sort of making sure that you have that kind of open dialogue with the DNO and get the connection agreement into the best possible shape before you sign it.

So, a couple of kind of really common errors that crop up on capacity to look for. So, the first, is that you are getting an export capacity and an import capacity. So, like there’s an example on the, the right there, I think that was from a small, very small wind farm, and they’ve got their export capacity set out at the bottom in kilowatt – so that’s good. So, we would expect export capacity to be at sort of an active power level, so in megawatts or in kilowatts, we might sometimes see that as a KVA figure, in which case that’s, that’s apparent power; we needed to start thinking about, you know, what was the power factor that was used to calculate that. So, so we’d probably expect for a generation connection to see that export capacity set out in kilowatts or megawatts – so that’s one thing that’s really important.

Import capacity, on the other hand, traditionally is set out in, in KVA, so apparent power. So, if you’re a demand connection, you know, you might have 10MVA of capacity, or in this case this was 55KVA of capacity for a, a little auxiliary supply, but your connection agreement doesn’t just set out what your import and export capacity agreement capacity sort of headroom is, it also sets out what the limit of the installed capacity is. So, this is often much more explicit in a connection agreement than it is in a connection offer. So, this is based on, you know, what you applied to connect. So, if you asked for, you know, three small wind turbines, and the total cumulative installed capacity of those turbines was in this case, 4.5 megawatts, or four and a half thousand kilowatts, then that would be stated really clearly in the connection agreements.

In fact, it would probably we’ll go into it or probably go down into the level of detail of saying what we are turbine models, you know, what the exact parameters; and this is a figure which you will come back to probably if you come to replant that site, for example, or make any changes later – so it’s really important that you know, your installed capacity might not be the same as your export capacity, and in this case it is, but you might have a site which had a higher instore capacity, and it’s really important to make sure you’ve kind of reserved the right to that higher instore capacity. So if you haven’t correctly recorded the actual installed capacity of inverters or turbines, or generating plants on the site, then when you come back to say, oh, you know, actually 10 years later, one of our inverters has failed and we like to replace it with a different model, you know, one of the critical questions will be, are you changing or increasing your installed capacity? So, making sure that installed capacity figure accurately reflects what’s on the site is, is kind of effectively protecting your interests when it comes to replanting in future.

00:11:08 – 00:12:06 – Philip Bake

I just pause there, I just, just to add, yeah. I think one of the things that we often find challenges around the import export capacity is that the DNO will often set that using the power factor for a specific project at the time when it connects.

So, as an example, G99 requires, you’d have the capability of doing 0.95 lead lag for a lot of intermittent generations would often see them only be applied anywhere between unity and 0.98 lead lag. If your power factor is based on a KVA in unity power factor, and then in the future the DNO asks you to operate at a different power factor, then that means that they would be expecting you to reduce your kilowatts or megawatts effectively to hit that MVA sort of setting.

And so one of the things that we will often try and negotiate with the DNO is to get the widest MVA setting for the project, which means that if you then change your power factor, you’re not having to reduce the megawatts or the kilowatts, the bits you’re actually being paid for.

00:12:07 – 00:12:47 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah. And if you, and that comes back to that; if you’ve got your, your export capacity set in your connection agreements in megawatts, then that is sort of I guess uncontestable, isn’t it for Philip, you know? If someone comes back and asks you to operate at different power factor, you’ve still got a right to export those megawatts, regardless of power factors, yeah, I really agree with that.

The last two points, so reservation capacity, or what’s sometimes referred to as a use it or lose it clause and also kind of looking at projects which might have phase capacities. So, these are going to be likely to be potentially sort of project specific terms that you might get in your connection agreement, the use it or lose it clause. In fact, we’ve got a couple of examples of these, Pete please can we…

00:12:48 – 00:12:49 – Pete Aston

Do you want me to just go over to the next slide?

00:12:49 – 00:14:26 – Catherine Cleary

Go to the next slide, yeah.

So, this, that first box, special conditions, this is, you know, really quite a standard, what we call a kind of use it or lose it clause. It effectively gives the DNO some rights to kind of claw back capacity that customers aren’t using, and the standard clause is if you use less than 75% of your import capacity or export capacity, for a 12-month period or more, then effectively it gives the DNO a right to come back and revise this connection agreement; it can be really important that you think about that, especially, you know, if you are, for example, maybe a demand customer and you perhaps haven’t actually built out all of your load yet, or you’re expecting your load to ramp up over time, or if you are, you know, even for sort of generation projects, if you were, again, planning a kind of like phase build out, so you perhaps only commissioning a part of your project, but you haven’t, you hadn’t designed the project like that, that’s perhaps cut coming at a later date, and so this clause might cause you some concern and you might want to go back to the DNO if you had a specific kind of phasing plan to say, actually, can we tell you now that we’re expecting, you know, something different to happen in the first couple of years just so that we don’t get kind of caught out by this, use it or lose it clause.

It’s probably worth saying, we don’t necessarily, we don’t see DNOs kind of proactively measuring everyone’s import and export on a regular basis and coming back to them and saying, hang on a moment, you used 74% last year, but I think the point is that this is, it’s quite a pragmatic way of a DNO in the event, a connection severely underutilized, being able to kind of get some of that capacity back.

00:14:27 – 00:14:55 – Philip Bale

And in addition to that, just very quickly, some DNOs will want you to submit the design submission based on the total installed capacity, including any future elements, which is often quite difficult to do if you’ve got a phased project and you haven’t done the detailed design for phase two that you are planning on connecting later, it’s trying to make sure that that’s captured in the connection agreement so that you don’t end up losing any second phase, sort of,  capability of building out the project.

00:14:56 – 00:16:02 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, and so that’s kind of an example of, so the bottom box, there is an example where a customer has gone back to the DNO and said, actually this was a hybrid solar and battery project, the solar is, is ready to go, the battery’s going to follow in due course. So can we have something in our connection agreement, which reflects that, so again, that was a project where, you know, originally, ideally, they were going to build them out together, they hit a delay on the battery side, and so the DNO added in this clause, which, is, you know, is just an example of the kind of wording you might be able to negotiate, to say actually you are, we acknowledge that you’re just doing this bit of the project initially, so, in that case, the PV, the connection agreement covered the capacity and the install capacities for both the PV and the battery in this case. But there was a time period left, to say basically you, you’ve only got that first 18 months if you know, if you, if you’re going to delay longer than that, you’re telling us you’re not going to build your battery for five years; you can’t hang onto that capacity indefinitely. So, we’ve put time limit on it, but that, that means effectively that, you know, you’ve got that 18-month period agreed, before that kind of any sort of use it or lose it, clause would kick in.

00:16:03 – 00:16:17 – Philip Bale

I’m sure this is going to worry lots of developers around CP2030 and Gate 2, where they’ve got different gated windows for their PV and the batteries. And there’ll need to be a conversation with the DNOs where there are mandated longer than 18-month delays to make sure that nothing is lost.

00:16:18 – 00:16:58 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, and I, and I, I think that’s a really good point. So, 18 months is a good kind of, I think 18 months is a good sort of rule of thumb. If your projects are separated by more than 18 months at the phases, then it might not be so appropriate for them to both, for both phases to be captured in that first connection agreement.

And the alternative is for simply the first phase or the first technology that you’re connecting to be captured in a connection agreement. And the other technology you might still hold a live connection offer for. So, you’ve kind of got, you’ve got a contractual agreement for both, but one of them is energized and covered under a connection agreement; the bit which isn’t energized and maybe is 3, 4, 5 years down the line is still covered under a connection offer, and that’s fine too.

00:16:59 – 00:17:28 – Pete Aston

We’ve got one question, that, well, there’s one from Angus around sort of ANM calls is being added. So, we’ll come back to that one later because we’ve got a section on sort of ANM constraints a bit later.

But there’s one from Matt Watts, how typical is it to see auxiliary supply listed separately from import? So, if I go back to the previous slide, is it, is this common to see this or is it, would you normally expect to see an auxiliary supply have its own sort of separate connection agreement?

00:17:29 – 00:18:30 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, it really varies between the DNOs. So, in this case, this is an auxiliary supply for the wind farm. It’s not just for, for example, I think, you know, as you can referenced in the question, it’s not, in some cases you might have a DNO that was just providing an auxiliary supply for the DNO substations, sort of LV auxiliary supplies.

But in this case, it is the auxiliary supply for both the, the DNO sub and the wind farm. So, I would say that’s kind of best practice. It just keep; it keeps it simpler if you can have everything in one connection agreement, but it probably is down to individual DNOs. So, some DNOs aren’t set up to deal with that because your, your auxiliary supply is maybe an LV or 11kV supply, which might have a different connection agreement template that a DNO uses. So that one will be down to what the DNO kind of policy is, but it’s worth making sure that if you have an auxiliary supply, you need it to be either reflected in the main connection agreement for, for the generator, for example, or you need to have a second, subsequent, auxiliary supply connection agreement, you want to make sure that it’s captured somewhere that you’ve got that right to that auxiliary supply.

00:18:30 – 00:18:56 – Pete Aston

Yeah. And you might find in some DNOs there’s different teams providing the different agreements and offers. Okay, so that was, that was good chat through capacity. Let’s turn our attention to power quality now because this comes crops up in connection agreements as well.

So, Catherine, do you want to just sort of talk us through some of these bits. I guess we’re more looking here at generation connections rather than demand in this case.

00:18:57 – 00:21:42 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah. Yeah. We, we are, you, you might see some power quality conditions in large demand users offers, but majority in the cases. This can be for generation sites or storage sites; so, harmonics, that’s G5, compliance of standard G5 and P28. There will have been specific clauses in the connection offer, which states, you know, that you must comply with, you know, with your harmonics, sort of, you know the general, you must comply with G5 standard, and you must comply with the P28 standard in your connection agreement those kind of generic statements might have been superseded by specific conditions.

So for example, if you then did a harmonic study, before you connected that showed actually, you were mostly compliant, but there were a couple of perhaps network outage scenarios under which you were non-compliant, or there was some kind of caveat associated with your compliance, then the DNO is quite likely to want to try and replicate that caveat in your connection agreement so that someone coming back to this 10 years later knows, you know, right, this solar farm, you know, is compliant with harmonics or was compliant with harmonics when it connected apart from in this one condition when they’ve agreed that they’re going to switch off one of their inverters or something. So, if you’ve signed up kind of voluntarily to any operational restrictions in order to comply with G5 or P28, then expect to see those reflected in your connection agreement.

The last point on G99, G59 compliance is probably really obvious actually, but just make sure that, so in particular, you know, these connection agreements hang around for a very long time, right? So, when we get involved in reviewing connection agreements, it’s not just for new sites connecting, t might be for sites which have been operational for some time, and perhaps they’re having a change to connection agreement because the DNO has changed something or the user wants to, you know, add a different technology or change one of their sort of generating units or something like that. In those cases where you’re sort of reviewing a historic connection agreement, it’s important to make sure that when a DNO kind of refreshes a connection agreement for any reason, they’re quite likely to just change everything onto their newest template. And newest templates tend to reflect kind of current versions of standards, but in fact, we do have kind of grandfathering rights. So, if you commissioned a G59 generator, you know, 10 years ago, then if you were changing something and perhaps adding a new generator to the site, the new generator would need to be compliant with G99, the new standard, but the old generators on the site, if they’re unchanged, will just remain under their G59 compliance. So this is just a, basically a typo kind of watch, but it’s really important if you accidentally sort of signed up to making the whole site G99 compliant to the new standard, you might have accidentally, signed yourself a, a big bill and a, a lot of headaches in terms of engineering works. So just making sure that, you know, you’re kind of, grandfathering any historic compliance standards.

00:21:43 – 00:22:27 – Pete Aston

Yeah, and I guess there’s a lot more to say on G99 and 59 compliances. But I think that would’ve to be a different webinar sadly, to dig into that in a bit more detail.

But I think there was one, one thing you picked up on there, Catherine, which was around reviewing existing connection offers. And I think it’s worth just highlighting that point to go if you’ve got a, you know, a generating site that you’ve never reviewed the connection agreement for, you should probably review it, because if, if nothing’s come up to bite you, yet, it doesn’t mean it won’t in the future, and also if, if you are in the process of sort of buying a site from someone else, that is a really, really important step to actually review a connection agreement in that process.

00:22:28 – 00:23:39 – Philip Bale

Just to add into this, there’s a couple of other terms that tend to crop up in this that are quite vague. So in a lot of demand connections, there’ll be a requirement to inform the DNO if you make any changes to your network or your site, that is deemed material and it’s never defined as to what is material and what is not material in terms of a change. And then also, more recently in the G99 documentations, if you are applying for a battery storage scheme, they will ask you to specify what is your operational regime for your battery, and that could have been five, six years ago. And it’s not unusual to see in connection agreements for battery storage schemes for them to be words that say, we require you to inform us if you are changing your operating regime. So, when you sign and apply for your battery, you may have thought, I have import capacity, export capacity, and I can do whatever I want. The DNO may try and block you doing some sort of fast frequency type response, which results in very big swings on the network. And that’s one of the things you’d want to make sure that you are aware around what you can and can’t do. And the DNO is aware around what you’re intending to do so there’s no grey issues or grey areas.

00:23:40 – 00:24:22 – Pete Aston

Thanks Phillip. There’s an interesting question come in around installed capacities; so that was probably around capacity, so it’s probably worth picking this one up now. The installed capacity originally submitted as part of the G99 application, change after three to four years due to the originally proposed inverter technology, no longer being available as a result of the updated inverter selection, alter the installed capacity. Should we notify and update the grid connection offer immediately or can this, uh, change be addressed during the sort of PGMD compliance process? So, I guess this is on the sort of the stage where there’s an accepted offer running up towards commissioning and the connection agreement being put in place, Catherine any thoughts?

00:24:23 – 00:26:16 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, and that’s a really common issue, isn’t it? I think we, you know, we see it a lot, you know, people want to build, you know, what current technology allows them to build, which might not be exactly what you put in your G99 application, I would flag that this can be really quite a material issue, there are slightly different approaches from DNO to DNO perhaps, if I was to describe the most kind of generous approach is to say, okay, you know, tell us what you’re going to build now, and as long as it doesn’t kind of exceed some key sort of envelope parameters so, for example, if you haven’t exceeded the fault level contribution from the site, so the more inverters or more generation capacity you put on that, the higher that fault level contribution will be.

So, you know, if you’re potentially still within that kind of existing fault level headroom that you’d applied for in your original G99 form and you’re not changing the export capacity of the site or the import capacity of the site, then the most generous DNOs will effectively allow you to make that change; you’re probably better off telling them sooner rather than later, and I  but I would be aware that there are some DNOs who have very clear policies on this, that any increase in your installed capacity is a material change and therefore it needs a new application, which would get a new queue position for that additional capacity, you know, worst case you’re sort of jeopardizing your connection date of the entire scheme -so, this is a really, really important point, it’s probably one where we’d always, you know, recommend having a sort of a conversation about that strategy before you just sort of went in and did it, waiting until the PGMD documentation goes in; so that’s, you know, typically sort of three months or so before connection is incredibly high risk because you’ve already built it by then you know, if they turn around and say, hang on a minute, this doesn’t match what’s on our system, you’ve increased your instore capacity, then you’re in a very uncomfortable position potentially of not being able to energize some of that capacity. So, I think, yeah, that, that’s, we could probably talk for hours on that one, couldn’t we Philip?

00:26:17 – 00:27:01 – Philip Bale

Yeah, and I think, just to be aware that a lot of the DNOs will see it as being material change primarily because it can be quite unfair if you have, if you’re in an ANM network area and you have an agreed capacity and then you significantly over plan that, then you could be changing the generation profiles compared to what other people will be expecting, which could then result in increase in curtailment for other people behind you.

So, there is good reason why some DNOs would turn around and, and apply this very, very strictly. And we should also come on later generally; most network operators won’t issue a connection agreement until six months before the intended connection time. So, we’d suggest this would be dealt with pre PGMD, pre connection agreement, basically at the fit and when you’ve got a detailed design for your project before you start ordering long lead term items.

00:27:02 – 00:27:42 – Pete Aston

And there’s another sort of related issue comes back to, I guess G99 compliance, which is not specifying the big enough inverters in the first place; get your reactive power requirements sorted, so you can then have to need to increase the amount or size of your inverters to meet G99 reactive power compliance, which again, leads to the same sort of issues about, in increasing your install capacity.

Okay well, let’s not go too far down the rabbit hole of G99 compliance, but that was a good question, right? So, let’s go on, Phillip generated technical details. There’s a whole sort of mishmash of things dumped on this slide. So, can you sort of just talk us through some of these, Philip?

00:27:43 – 00:29:31 – Philip Bale

Yep. So, on the whole people will end up taking the fault level contribution that comes from your PGMD will ultimately end up coming into this. So obviously you’ll have your original fault level calculations as expected at the time that you applied. You’ll then go through and recalculate your fault level contributions that are based on what you are actually planning on building and installing, there is differences across all of the different DNOs, some of which will allow modest increases where it is seen as being non-material, others will say that you can’t increase your fault level by 0.001KA, at any point this can be a real challenge, especially around document control; we’ve seen multiple people resubmit different ENA forms, G99 forms that have gone in, which then means, because this often isn’t detailed in the connection agreement, it can be very difficult to work out what the contracted fault level contribution for a project actually is; what the DNO hold on their records, what they use as part of your project progression to the transmission network operator. And that can cause a lot of problems, especially in areas where there are fault level constraints, whether DNO will feel that there is no option of increasing that. So, you’d expect that to be detailed in your connection agreement and clearly stated in there as details.

Also, the generating parameters in there, how many inverters, transformers, rating characteristics. It’s good practice to have that installed so that if you ever need to go back and change anything, you know what was in there before and what you can go through and change.

Protection settings are also listed in there; this is a contract of what you will hold in your relay, on the whole Roadnight Taylor are not protection engineers, but there are sometimes where we will spot issues, where the protection settings look very different to what we’d expect them to be.

00:29:32 – 00:29:36 – Pete Aston

And, and, sorry, Philip, just, and these are the protection settings on the metering circuit breaker.

00:29:37 – 00:30:24 – Philip Bale

These are on the metering circuit breaks. These are the customer owned circuit breaker at the interface with the DNO that get included within the connection agreement. And there again, the operational mode for the projects is another example. So, will your project operate as a fixed power factor? What will that be? What will be the DNOs rights to go through and change that? A lot of times it’s a phone call and do it within 28 days, but they could also ask you to do voltage control. And if you are in voltage control, understanding that that is your requirement, what you’ll be expected to do. And I often think confirming with them what the voltage set point should be and the droop settings, which are often in the G99 requirements anyway, but just to make sure that that is clarified so that you as the customer understand what the DNO was expecting you to do.

00:30:25 – 00:30:35 – Pete Aston

I’ve spotted before Philip and connection agreements, the DNOs asking for both power factor control and voltage control because they’ve got two separate clauses they can choose and they just put both in.

00:30:36 – 00:30:52 – Philip Bable

I’ve controlled that, I have seen voltage control, power factor control, and two different power factors in the same agreement as well, where effectively a DNO has changed one setting but not the rest, which then results in contradictions, you don’t know whether you are operating at unity or 0.98

00:30:53 – 00:31:18 – Pete Aston

Yeah, the systems are definitely not foolproof. So, which is why we should check all these things.

Just coming back to that question around, changing inverter types, so the sort of caveat to that was if the fault level has not increased, or fault in feed, I guess has not increased, I guess the DNOs are, are more likely to be sort of happier to, to accept a change, aren’t they? If there’s …

00:31:19 – 00:31:28 – Philip Bale

They can be, but if they feel like it’ll have a detrimental impact on other people, behind, other people’s curtailment risk would increase, they are within their rights to say no.

00:31:29 – 00:31:39 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, we could phrase that the other way around, couldn’t we? If the fault level is increased, I don’t think any DNO is going to allow it as an allowable change. If the fault level isn’t increased, then possibly you’ve got to a shot, but all of those risks, as Philip says.

00:31:40 – 00:31:51 – Philip Bale

I’ve had one DNO state verbally, that if it’s less than 10%, then they’ll review it, and if they think it’s appropriate, they will allow it. So, I think there is a, a vast array of differences across everyone, but I’ve never had that in writing.

00:31:52 – 00:32:12 – Pete Aston

Right, thank you. Let’s move on to constraints.

So, this is a biggie, we’re going to go to our resident ANM and constraints expert, Mr. Bale, thank you. Do you want to just talk us through what we could expect in a connection agreement in relation to ANM, abnormal running, et cetera?

00:32:13 – 00:34:01 – Philip Bale

Yeah, so these are probably some of the more newer terms that have been in there. Obviously, connection agreements have been around for a very long time, but over time there has been more focused on abnormal running restrictions and then more focus on active network management. So, a control system controlling and reducing the export in real time under normal network running – so those are the two differences here. The abnormal running restrictions are if something is degraded in the network, there’s an M minus one, M minus one minus one, or even in some instances an M minus three event, that you could be constrained down and with ANM, it’s under normal network running.

There’s a vast array of different terms that are in there and often in my view, they are quite loose and grey and very broad and not very detailed. So often the standard ANM clauses that you would see is that the DNO will definitely put in writing that they have possibly given you indications, given you data, which allows you to work out what your risk is of constraint. But they by no means will warranty that that will be there and anything can change in the network, which then means that your curtailment position could get better and it could get worse. Some DNOs will put in LIFO positions, they’ll even declare that they’re following a last in first out position for active network management, but others won’t. So, if there’s nothing in there, you have nothing contractually to say where you sit in a queue and what happens if DNOs move networks across and could you be disadvantaged? I would also argue that some network operators have clauses in there, which would be impossible for them to go through and to comply with.

00:34:02 – 00:34:10 – Pete Aston

Is it best, Philip If there’s more detail or less detail around these sorts of ANM and abnormal running sources?

00:34:11 – 00:35:22 – Philip Bale

I would prefer more detail personally. So, if you are on a network and at the time that the network operator assessed the network, your only constraint was on a set of BSP transformers, I would want that in the connection agreement, which then stops the DNO increasing it in the future because they’ve decided to rearrange their network. Some DNOs will put that in in writing, others will say, actually no, I want to have the capability of changing my network and in the future if I change my network, I want to have the capability of adding additional ANM constraint points that weren’t needed at the point that we assessed your connection or at the point that we connected you.

I think that is challenging for any generator to accept but ultimately is in a lot of connection agreements where it says you have ANM and there’s nothing more than that, that’s going through. So, I think it is beneficial to have more information knowing that there are certain legitimate changes, and at least for it to be in writing around what those changes could be and what the DNO will endeavour to do.

On the, and I’ll pause there, if anyone’s got any comments?

00:35:23 – 00:35:28 – Pete Aston

No, no, I was just going to go onto the slide, the next slide, which has got a bunch of examples on.

00:35:29 – 00:35:30 – Philip Bale

Yeah, please.

00:35:30 – 00:35:38 – Pete Aston

Sorry, I, I sort of stopped you mid flow, but do, is it worth you sort of just carrying on what you’re saying and then, and then talking us through some of these…

00:35:39 – 00:36:54 – Philip Bale

So, these are three different examples.

If we go with the bottom one first. This is an example from a connection agreement from UKPN where they will say that they will do LIFO and there’ll be a register and that they will do their best to make sure that they don’t disadvantage your position by connecting other people in after your connected, which would then affect your LIFO position.

There is an example that’s come from Scottish Power Man web, where they have a local monitoring system that’s in place and they will include the terms and the conditions that’s in there and what impact that could have on the operation of the project.

And the one in the middle I think is a really good example of abnormal network running arrangement that says – if this specific action happens, this is when we will turn you off or down. It’s not an exhaustive list, but a control engineer who’s looking at that project when something happens, can look at that agreement and know that someone has studied it and what should be in scope and outer scope for that connection as opposed to what we see in some connection agreements; it says when the network is running abnormally, we have the rights of turning you off, which means at 3:00 AM in the morning when a network is tripped, a control engineer is expected to make decisions without any power system analysis and they don’t know what the contractual relationship for your project is.

00:36:55 – 00:38:08 – Pete Aston

That’s great. We’ll come back to, we’ll stay on ANM and stuff. I’ll just give a quick reminder that if you haven’t yet completed the poll that we’ve popped up, that’d be great if you could do that. I don’t know if you would need to reshare that or something, Laura. But there is a poll going on, I think about half of you have completed it, it’d be great if some of the others could as well, and then we can show results at the end.

There’s a few questions that have come in, in the Q&A relating to ANM and they’re all quite difficult, so you’re definitely going to have to answer Phillip. In the first one, there’s an original offer, which is then being sort of renewed in 2023, difficult to know what renewed means, but looks like DNO is trying to add in ANM clauses into this; in the meantime, I guess this isn’t, definitely a connection agreement issue, but I guess it’s sort of the, this an example of the sort of conversation that is going to, where changes happen that need to flow through into a connection agreement.

But I don’t know if you can quickly talk into are DNOs allowed to just impose ANM on you, when you did this accept ANM in the first place?

00:38:09 – 00:38:55 – Philip Bale

This is a bit of a bug bear of mine, if I’m honest. There is a contract between a customer and a DN, and whilst I would consider the terms to be fairly asymmetrical, that most of the terms tend to be more in the DNOs favour than in the customer’s favour.

There is a contract of what is an allowable change and what’s a non-allowable change. And we quite often see DNOs trying to add terms or change terms, some of which are not in line or in spirit with the agreement. So, I think obviously there’s probably some background for this; it’s not unusual that we would see this, and yeah, it needs a very detailed conversation and possibly also including the lawyers in terms of is what is being proposed, an allowable change or a non-allowable change.

00:38:54 – 00:40:23 – Catherine Cleary

Yep. I guess also Philip, I think I really agree with that, but maybe it’s quite different. In fact, I think there were two questions weren’t the Pete quite different perhaps depending on whether ANM is being proposed still for a connection which hasn’t yet been built out, so you’re kind of still in that sort of engineering design conversation phase, and it feels like at that point you’d expect there to be quite a robust conversation to say, hang on a moment, what, you know, why have you changed your mind? What went wrong with the original studies and so on.

I suppose there are some scenarios where, which we’ve seen where a customer has ended up with ANM, so, you know, so whatever the process was, whether they were expecting it, we’ve definitely seen scenarios where perhaps there’s been confusion over whether ANM was required for like, both phases of a project or both technologies of a project was the ANM required for the import capacity as well as the export. Some of those things which have been grey and then effectively the site has ended up being built and the DNO has said to energize this, you know, you’ve got to have an ANM box and it’s doing this by that stage, you know, which is perhaps a bit more like the second question. If ANM is being implemented on a site for whatever reason, perhaps it wasn’t correctly reflected in the connection offer or maybe even the first version of a connection agreement.

I guess probably our view is that if you’ve got an ANM box on site, it’s already constraining you actually, you need to have that ANM and the associated kind of protect limited protections that you might get reflected in your connection agreement. Would that be your, your take too?

00:40:24 – 00:41:01 – Philip Bale

I think so. And also just one other nuance that you can see is that a lot of offers were issued and then a very delayed project progression. It’s not unusual for someone to come back with a variation, which says, we have now put the project through a transmission impact assessment. And as a result of that transmission impact assessment, there is now a requirement of doing tANM at the boundary between the DNO and the transmission system operator or transmission network operator.

And this is an alternative to building out new SGTs; so sometimes it can be in customer’s benefit, but yeah, just want to, to have that very sort of open and sort of at times frank conversation.

00:41:02 – 00:41:45 – Pete Aston

Yeah, yeah. So, sorry if we can’t fully sort of dig into the, the ins and outs of all those specific issues, but a lot of these things end up being site specific, don’t they? And you have to sort of go on a case-by-case basis and work it through. And sometimes it is just a case of getting the right person from the DNO in the room and going. Really, this doesn’t case-by-case, let’s have the conversation, let’s sort of talk it through, yeah, because some of the rules just aren’t, aren’t massively clear around this.

Okay. Let’s move on to some sort of commercial terms, Catherine, I think you were just going to talk us through some, some of the bits here that may seem obvious, but I think are just worth pointing out.

00:41:46 – 00:43:02 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah. So, contracted parties, sort of customer names, so I mean, there’s one thing here, which is about sort of, you know, just making sure that there’s continuity; so sort of, you know, that the legal entity that had the connection, that held the connection offer you know, if they are the person, party, building out and owning and operating the project, then they would obviously be the customer name. It’s worth perhaps us just explaining that connection agreements have slightly different terminology.

So effectively they are dealing with, you know, whereas your connection offer is effectively issued to a, a customer and that customer is the contracted party, a connection agreement in general is issued to a, we talk about a premises being a customer effectively. So, if you’re in particular, if you’re a load customer, you might find that that’s actually your sort of physical postal address, you know, so the idea of a site and a customer’s premises become really important, as well as the kind of legal entity, you know, the SPV, the limited company, that is responsible for signing that agreement. So, you need to make sure that both things are correct, you know, so once it comes to connection agreements, things like, you know, issues with addresses are actually really, really important because a lot of the general terms and conditions refer to customer premises, and that is your address.

Philip, sorry, did you want to come in there?

00:43:03 – 00:43:50 – Philip Bale

Yeah, I was just going to say one of the things that I’d also be aware of is that if you are a, an owner of a building that has a demand import and a connection agreement, who has the rights of changing that connection agreement, and if you have a tenant that’s in there who is paying the bills, that is ultimately occupying that building, do they have the commercial right of amending that connection agreement with the DNO, because obviously that will amend their contract and their bills, because obviously if you have a large import capacity, it is not being utilized and that will be reflected in their bills. So, I think if you are a owner of a building and it is leased out, I would suggest it will be worth understanding those nuances that can exist.

00:43:51 – 00:45:45 – Catherine Cleary

And generally speaking, um, this comes up, it’s, it’s good to pick this up when your draft connection agreement is issued to you, because the other time this comes up is when you are 10 years down the line and you want to make an application to increase your capacity, for example, or add some generation behind the meter, something like that, and the first thing the DNO will say is – can I confirm that the applicant who’s trying to make this change is the contracted party who holds the connection agreement. So, so that’s really worth, if you weren’t, you know, then you’d need all the sort of letter authorities and so on, permissions from that party held the connection agreement. So, making sure that connection agreement is held by the right party. Also, a valid ongoing legal entity, don’t sort of, you know, score any own goals by letting it just lapse, in a basement with a, an entity which is no longer actually active.

The second point there, MPANs, so just, just to be really clear that your, connection agreement will list your specific, export MPANs, import MPANs. If you’ve got auxiliary supplies, and that’s captured in the connection agreement, then the auxiliary supply MPANs should be in there as well, there’s a bit of a catch 22 with MPANs that some people may be aware of, where, a DNO has said to them, we can’t issue you, your MPANs, um, we can’t go through the process to issue your MPANs until you’ve signed the draft connection agreement. So in that case, so for example, I think that that’s SSE policy at the moment, in that case, you would need to effectively review a very draft connection agreement, which might not have all the site specific terms we’ve talked about in it, and you might be asked to sign that in order to get your MPANs in order for them to then update the connection agreement, prior to you connecting.

So, we’ll, we’ll sort of come onto the kind of process, if that happens. But generally speaking, you would expect a draft connection agreement to be issued to you with the MPANs in it.

00:45:46 – 00:46:39 – Pete Aston

Yep, agreed. I’m just going to take us back one slide because there was something I was going to say around the sort of list of network constraints.

So, we supported a client, a few years back, where, where a site had been connected for 10 years, and they just started experiencing significant outages on their site because of clauses in their connection agreement that they maybe hadn’t realized were in there or hadn’t realized the impact of those outages; and they were getting outages sort of for weeks or months at a time during the year. So, that’s why I say that it’s worth reviewing connection agreements for connected sites, even if you think so far, they’ve been okay, because they might not be next year if the DNO starts switching you out for outages, for constraints that you didn’t realize you had.

00:46:40 – 00:46:55 – Philp Bale

And what Pete didn’t mention there is he came in and saved them and found a solution, which saved them significant financial hardship in terms of going through and doing it. But that’s not always easy and it’s always better to do it far earlier in the process and having to do it whilst facing some fairly significant disruptions.

00:46:56 – 00:47:12 –  Pete Aston

Absolutely. Thank you for that, you’ve embarrassed me now. Right, no, you haven’t actually embarrassed me, but the non-techie stuff. Let’s have a look at this Philip, I think Philip, you’re going to go through this. So, so there, there’s lots of other bits and pieces in connection offers, connection agreements, sorry.

00:47:13 – 00:49:09 – Philip Bale

Yep. So, this is the bit that we tend to be less involved with, but we would suggest that you are very much aware of the responsibilities and the roles and the legal elements that’s in there. One of the things that we find delays the signing of the final agreement the most is having wayleaves easements access rights, agreed and signed off in a way that’s the DNO is happy with.

So, I would say that is one of the elements that often delays the, the connection agreement, being signed. Ultimately you need to understand what is the maintenance requirements. One of the ones that often comes up, especially for 33kV connections, is that whilst the DNO will adopt the switchgear within the DNO substation on a connection, they will not be responsible for the maintenance of it. So effectively, if the 33kV building or container or room that the customer has built, that the DNO has adopted, the equipment inside starts to fail, and then their equipment that they’ve adopted within it fails catastrophically, i.e. water leak that causes a switch gear to fail, the customer will be responsible for; if you are responsible for the maintenance of the building, you won’t have access to that building – that building will have DNO locks on it. So that’s one of the areas that you may want to go through and be aware of and consider and have an agreement in writing around what you would want to do with that scenario.

Site responsibilities. There again, who is responsible for what? There is boxes of equipment’s across the boundaries. If one of them fails, who is responsible for replacing it? If it needs maintaining who is responsible for it, and then the legal review around the other more legalistic texts, which also includes the way wayleaves and easements and the access rights.

So there’s lots of other non-techy stuff in there that you should be aware of, and it’s just important to make sure it’s right so that there is a clearly defined contract between the two parties.

00:49:10 – 00:49:37 – Pete Aston

What’s the sort of view here, Philip and Catherine, around legal review? Because obviously when, when we review connection agreements, we’re tending to, you know, to review the sort of more technical side of things and then there’s a whole bunch of, you know, T&C’s at the back that we tend to not dig into too much, because I guess they’re reasonably standard. But, you know, do we recommend legal reviews or, or not?

00:49:38 – 00:51:04 – Catherine Cleary

I think the legal point can be really useful, but not so much to review the standard T&C’s of the DNO Pete, but to align with all of the other legal and land related agreements. So, you know, as Philip says, sort of like those, those easements, those access rights, you’ve probably got some lawyers who were involved in drawing up those easements and those property rights.

And I would definitely get them to check the connection agreement as well, because I would say it like Philip says, that really common scenario where you’ve got a, a substation building for example, which in theory the connection agreement says you are responsible for maintaining, but you’ve just agreed a land lease with the DNO, which gives you no access rights to it, and so you wouldn’t be able to maintain it or even spot if it was, you know, unless it was falling down, you wouldn’t be able to spot if it was leaking, so I think that that’s really helped on other projects to sort of close the loop. So, there’s normally two outcomes there – one is either that the DNO says, okay, we’ll write something at the connection agreement that says you have to maintain this building. If we tell you, it’s not, you know, it’s not looking so good because we’ll be the ones in it. Or actually we might change that lease we’ve just signed with you to add a provision of access for maintenance purposes as long as it’s, you know, agreed in advance with us, so supervised access or something like that. So normally one of those two legal agreements has to change. It might not be the connection agreement, it might have been the other, you know, easement or lease or even, you know, or even freehold access rights, that you’ve just negotiated. So, I think the lawyers can be really useful at kind of like, uh, sort of putting those two things together, Pete.

00:51:05 – 00:51:27 – Philip Bale

I think just one other thing that I forgot to add was some of them is around, the lengths and responsibilities and requirements. If you want a loop connection, sometimes the DNOs will want rights for that substation for 99 years. And also making sure that that reflects in the agreement that you have with the landholder, because often they will include clauses, which are 25 or 40 years.

00:51:28 – 00:51:51 – Pete Aston

Yep, you know, we we’re likely to have time for a few more questions. So, so if you’ve got any more questions, pop them in the Q&A because I think we have one more slide to go, which is on timings so yeah, I think Catherine, you may be going to talk us through, through this?

00:51:52 – 00:54:22 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, so, I think it’s a really classic question is when should I get my connection agreement? So, most DNOs, a lot of DNOs won’t issue connection agreements more than six months before energization. And that’s in particular where they need to populate the specific technical information that goes into that connection agreement. I think, Pete, you were saying you have an example of an 11kV demand offer where they, they gave you the connection offer and the connection agreement both at the same time, you know, presuming a couple of years before you connected.

So, I mean, I guess that’s the kind of gold standard. The earlier, the better, so that you can have a look at those clauses and start the kind of discussions. I think the main point really to take away from this is that it is a process – so don’t just sign the first version that you get, definitely read it, we nearly always end up making some small changes. And as I say, the DNOs are kind of used to that process. It’s in everyone’s interests that the, the agreement itself is the kind of most reflective it can be of what’s actually on the ground. So, you’ll get that draft, you know, definitely this is something you should be sort of thinking about six months before energisation, review it. As I say, a couple of DNOs may actually say, look, you need to sign this draft version, so that we can start that MPAN process. Now you’re probably going to need that MPAN process to start at least kind of three to four months before you are looking to energize because that can become a critical path.

So if you are under pressure to sign a draft connection agreement, which doesn’t yet fully reflect the site, you haven’t resolved some of those technical issues that we’ve talked about, then what we would recommend is you will probably have to sign it, but you can absolutely annotate that agreement before you sign it so you can be highlighting the issues which you think need to be resolved, and you’re essentially signing subject to the resolution, you know, sort of satisfactory resolution of those issues. So, you know, send back an annotated PDF with a signature, they’ve got something signed, but you’ve also kind of got a to-do list of things to fix.

Those technical queries, so there probably will be some technical queries that maybe need to go back to system planners, especially if you’ve got questions about capacity, you know, if something’s being listed in MVA rather than megawatts, you know, and you want to go back, that’s going to require a little bit digging. So, there will be sort of technical queries, and it can take a couple of months to get these things right, and then you get the final version issued by the DNO, you sign it and they sign it as well. So, you should keep a copy of your countersigned connection agreement; they’re incredibly useful documents whenever you want to change anything on your site, and it’s incredibly common that you, you know, if someone’s got a 10-year-old site that the connection agreement may have got lost, so yeah, keep it somewhere safe, and that’s that kind of process I think, Pete.

00:54:23 – 00:54:29 – Pete Aston

DNOs should be able to provide you with a copy of your connection agreement if you’ve lost yours. So, hopefully they’ve got a copy if you don’t.

00:54:30 – 00:54:42 – Catherine Cleary

I think, yeah, probably, I would say that both organizations are probably equally at risk of having challenges in finding connection agreements, which are kind of more than 10 years old, so yeah, everything that you can do to keep a copy.

00:54:43 – 00:55:02 – Philip Bale

And just on that, keep on where we’ve seen that, where there has been a, a challenge where ultimately someone doesn’t have a copy effectively, they’ll just move you onto the NTS, effectively the default version of the connection agreements. Often, it’s more for very old demand connections that we tend to see this with, so it’s not the end of the world if you haven’t, but ultimately at that point, it’s a bit of grain as to what should have been in there originally.

00:55:03 – 00:55:36 – Pete Aston

Yeah, there was one sort of last question that’s come in really around ANM terms, so maybe for you Philip, so this is the ANM terms and the connection offer have changed through to what is now being sort of shown in the connection agreement, what can you do as a developer? Can you insist the DNO uses the terms that they originally sent you in the connection offer? You know what I think we sort of talked through this a little bit, but yeah, I don’t know if, maybe just rehearse this one more time?

00:55:36 – 00:56:46 –  Philip Bale

I think this is incredibly challenging in terms of going through because there are legitimate times where the DNO is going to need to go through and vary the terms. And I think my personal view is what is acceptable changes and what’s not, and what are legitimate changes and what’s not. So, for me, whilst I would want them to be included in the connection agreement, I think there is a good chance that it is going to change in the future. This connection agreement doesn’t necessarily have to be a onetime only. It can be varied by mutual agreement between the DNO and the customer. So, I think in future, there will be more of that, which is more of a transmission element aspect, applying more to distribution connection offers, I think you, just as my sort of key aspect is that I think customers who are signing up to connection agreements with ANM need to understand as much as they realistically can, what are the what can be changed and what won’t be changed, and to try and secure their position as best they possibly can, knowing it’s an incredibly difficult question and answer with no necessarily right or wrong answers.

00:56:47 – 00:56:48 – Pete Aston

Okay.

00:56:48 – 00:56:49 – Philip Bale

Quite well answered there.

00:56:50 – 00:57:02 – Pete Aston

Yeah, that’s fine. Thank you. Thank you, Phillip. Thank you, Catherine. Laura, I think we’re going to share the results of the poll. I don’t know if I do this, Laura, or whether you do this. If you can come off mute and talk to me.

00:57:03 – 00:57:05 – Laura Porter

I have shared them so hopefully people can see them.

00:57:06 – 00:58:22 – Pete Aston

Oh, right. So, you’re just sharing it with everybody? I can, I can just do it. I’ll just pop this box across, onto, onto the screen. So, so question one was, how are connection agreements typically handled within your organization?

So, the majority review internally, some review externally a few, not routinely reviewed, and a few not sure as well. So, hopefully this has helped for those, sort of down the bottom end to, to go yet just get, get it reviewed either internally or externally.

And the second one was how familiar are familiar are you with the ongoing obligations within your connection agreements? Bit of a range here, some very familiar, some somewhat familiar, some, some are aware they exist, but not in detail, so it, it’d be great for this bar to sort of move upwards, to the very familiar, we, we would certainly encourage you to be very familiar with what’s in your connection agreement because it’s really important for your, for your connection.

That is it, we got just two minutes left. I guess any final comments from Philip, Catherine, from your side?

00:58:23 – 00:58:38 – Catherine Cleary

I think that’s really encouraging and hopefully this webinar gives people like a little bit more confidence reviewing those, internally as well. I think it’s definitely a yeah, as you say, the more, the more you review it, the more familiar organizations are with their connection agreements, and I think that’s really positive.

00:58:39 – 00:59:01 – Philip Bale

I think just the one thing that we find is that when we engage with the DNOs around this, there is a two-way conversation and they can be changed and updated and, clarity sorts; I think it’s not being afraid to go back and have the conversation on the specific terms that need clarity to them, to try and make sure that when you start this commercial agreement between the two parties, that the connection agreement isn’t the best possible place for both sides.

00:59:02 – 00:59:10 – Pete Aston

Yeah. Thank you, Laura, will this webinar be available, to download and watch after this session at some point?

00:59:11 – 00:59:17 – Laura Porter

Yes, it will. It’ll be shared with everyone who attended and registered. So, if you couldn’t attend, but yeah.

00:59:18 – 01:00:15 – Pete Aston

Great. So, so yeah, if others in your organization didn’t get the opportunity to, to watch, then, then hopefully you’ll be able to sort of share that across, and I guess the other thing to say is if you haven’t caught up with our ongoing sort of podcasts and so on, that we do take, take a look at the website I think podcasts are available on various sort of streaming channels as well. So, what we call the Connectology podcast I think, I do them, but I never listen to them! So, we, we’ve got quite a few good ones booked up for this year, I was going to say in the queue, but that feels like too much like Connections Reform, doesn’t it? So, we’ve got quite a lot of podcasts lined up, so keep an eye out for those as they come out this year, but we’ve ticked over to 11 o’clock, so we’re going to leave it there. Thank you everyone so much for joining us and we hope you’ll join us for the next one and, thank you, Philip, thank you, Catherine.

01:00:16 – 01:00:17 – Catherine Cleary

Thanks, Pete.

01:00:18 – 01:00:18 – Philip Bale

Bye all.