Podcast: Guest Series with Amanda Le Brocq, Sarah Jeffery and Mark Baker, National Grid Electricity Distribution

00:00:05 –Pete Aston

Hello and welcome to another podcast from Roadnight Taylor. I’m Pete Aston, one of the engineers here at Roadnight Taylor, and I’m joined by my colleague, Nikki Pillinger. So nice to have you along Nikki, and very excited to have three guests from National Grid Electricity Distribution with us as well. So, we’ve got Amanda Le Brocq, who’s Director of Connections, Sarah Jeffery, who’s Head of Strategic Customer Engagement, and Mark Baker, who is also Head of Strategic Customer Engagement – so welcome, thank you for coming along.

00:00:34 – Amanda Le Brocq

Thank you for having us.

00:00:36 – Pete Aston

No problem. So to start with, can you just give us sort of each a quick introduction to what your role is, maybe a bit about how you got into the role as well?

00:00:45 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, so I’ll go first. I’m Director of Connections, I’ve been in the role for almost a year, I can’t quite believe it. Prior to that, I was in National Grid as Head of UK and Corporate Strategy but have been in grid just over two years now. Prior to that, my career has been a bit different to most people in grid; I was in financial services, I worked for Goldman Sachs, Barclays, MBNA, Lloyds Banking Group, my last role was Head of Strategy for Goldman Sachs. But I did actually start off my career in middle and central estate, so I feel like I’ve come home to roost. But I have to say the sector has changed beyond recognition since I was there, because it was a long time ago. But essentially, yeah, I am Director of Connections – I don’t own the full end-to-end process, but we’ll probably get into that as we go through.

00:01:33 – Pete Aston

Okay, and so just, I think it’s interesting for anyone who’s listening who hasn’t been in a DNO for all their life – if you want a job in a DNO, it’s possible, right?

00:01:45 – Amanda Le Brocq

Absolutely. I mean, I have to say I thought financial services was complex, but energy is on a whole new level, and increasingly so, but never was energy so exciting and sexy – everyone’s talking about connections these days.

00:01:56 – Pete Aston

And I guess it’s useful actually for the industry as a whole to have perspectives that are coming from the outside. You know things where everyone’s thought it’s a challenge or it’s an impossible – maybe you can challenge that?

00:02:08 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, and you know financial services, there’s lots of parallels in the regulated industry and I think you know where we’re heading to now, particularly thinking about the end-to-end connections review, and where we’re going with ED3 is having a really sharp laser focus on consumers and with financial services and consumer duty, that’s quite embedded now and you know I’m kind of aspiring to be at that level with them, with how we treat our customers, and there’s lots more in the pipeline. But lots of really interesting parallels and it’s not impossible – but I think the reason I ended up here was not because I know a lot about energy and connections, but I have a strategic perspective and I’m able to kind of simplify and bring things together, and ask those questions you know about ‘why’ and ‘why not’ and ‘why can’t we’? And I think that probably that’s what you need to try and make the progress, because some of this stuff is really complex and just cutting through with some simplicity is exactly what we need.

00:02:59 – Pete Aston

Brilliant thanks.

Sarah, over to you.

00:03:02 – Sarah Jeffery

So, I’ve worked in connections on and off for about 15 years. I joined the electricity distribution part of the business last June, and prior to that I worked in our electricity transmission business, and before that I was in the ESO business, and prior to actually joining National Grid I came from hotel management. I’m really really passionate about the customer, putting myself in the customers shoes, and I want us to, you know, strive for the customer to serve them the best way that we possibly can. So, it may not seem like a natural fit, having come from hospitality, into the energy sector, but actually there’s so much that can be done and so much you know you can actually learn, to be able to put yourself in those customers shoes. So, I find it really exciting, hence why I’ve stayed in National Grid for so long.

00:03:48 – Pete Aston

Yeah, and do you have a particular sort of subset of activities that you’re looking at in your role?

00:03:55 – Sarah Jeffery

Yeah, so I’m leading on community energy for electricity distribution well, National Grid Electricity Distribution, and I’m also leading on our engagement programme for our customers.

00:04:06 – Pete Aston

Okay so, I suspect some of our listeners might have come across you before on some of the customer engagement side of things.

00:04:13 – Sarah Jeffery

Yeah, we’ve done, we’ve got various webinars I’m sure we’ll probably come over to that, we’ve got our connections webinar that we hold on a bi-monthly basis, and we also have our reform webinar that’s held on a monthly basis, and there are other events that we do as well, face to face. We’ve got a whole program that we, you know, we have launched, and we will be launching more in 2026. Reforms obviously dominated quite a lot this year and will continue to do so. So, at the moment we’re holding a little bit back, but we’ll get there.

00:04:44 – Pete Aston

Okay, brilliant. And Mark do you want to just sort of tell us a little bit about what you do then?

00:04:48 – Mark Baker

Yeah, sure, so I joined around about the same sort of time as Sarah in the summer last year, but I’ve been in a National Grid group for about 15 years now and interestingly I came from retail banking so I was a personal account manager for a few years before joining National Grid as a trainee project engineer, and I’ve sort of worked my way up through the business, worked in commercial roles, I had a stint with electricity market reform for a number of years running capacity market and CFD auctions. So, I’ve got a really broad experience that I think I’ll bring into this team, but certainly new into the distribution world – so looking forward to trying to make a change here.

00:05:24 – Pete Aston

Fantastic, that’s brilliant. Amanda, can you just give us a sense of the structure of your team? So, is it called the Connections Team, is that what?

00:05:32 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yes. So, when I joined last April, effectively the team was, it used to be like part of customer and, I think, some of the other DNOs, they still have customer connectors together because there are so much connected tissue. But we felt that, particularly with reform and we just felt that there was a real step up that we need to do in terms of delivering the right outcomes for our connection’s customers, that it made sense to set up a whole new directorate and really drive the focus that we needed to. So, I inherited a team, which kind of the connection’s applications team, so they kind of manage all the front end. But then I’ve completely built the rest of the team out from there and in terms of what sits within my area, I have strategic customer engagement and Mark and Sarah have been building their teams out. I’ve got digital strategy – there’s so much we need to do in the space of self-serve digital tools for customers, making data more accessible and transparent, and just really helping that digital journey for our customers. I’ve also got pricing and analytics and just really driving more consistency in that space. I actually have a vertical on transport decarbonisation because there’s so much that we’re trying to deliver against the government’s agenda on Rapid Charge Fund and the Levi Fund. And also, how could I forget the strategy performance policy area, which that team is super on fire at the moment!

Have I missed anything out? I think that’s about it. I’ll get killed if I’ve missed anything out!

00:07:04 – Pete Aston

So, is the team still growing then?

00:07:05 – Amanda Le Brocq

Well, I’ve established my heads of, and I have missed one bit out actually, which is the kind of the connections applications team and there’s a sort of operations efficiency, so operations optimisation – so it’s all about how we can drive that standardisation across our end-to-end process and make sure that our customers are getting consistent experience and we’re just delivering that uplifting customer experience. So, we are still continuing to build the team. It’s pretty much locked in, in terms of that’s the remit that we have. We’re just driving as much as we can through building out the next level down.

00:07:42 – Pete Aston

Yeah, brilliant, exciting times for the team.

00:07:45 –  Amanda Le Brocq

Yes, yeah, and we’ve achieved. It was great because I had the opportunity to bring our CEO up to date with all the progress that the team has made, and it was actually fantastic. I’m always always looking ahead, looking at what we need to do, what we have to do, what’s ahead of us to deliver against our agenda and quite often I forget what’s already been achieved and I think in the last like 10-11 months, it’s been quite an incredible journey and you look back, I’m so proud of the team. They’ve achieved so much, and I think we’re getting quite a lot of recognition within the company externally for the great things that we’ve been delivering.

00:08:20 – Pete Aston

That’s fantastic.

So, Nikki and I have got a whole bunch of things we’d really like to talk to you about, and the first one on the agenda is surprise, surprise, drumroll Connections Reform. So, it’s the gift that keeps on giving across the industry, so both ourselves and Roadnight Taylor and yourselves in NGED have engaged lots on the details around Connections Reform so we didn’t really want to jump into too much of that on the podcast today – there’s plenty of other things if listeners want to dig into that, to go and explore. But what we wanted to explore was – what’s it been like within NGED trying to deliver Connections Reform? Because you know, just from within Roadnight Taylor, it’s jolly difficult just keeping up to date with what’s going on, let alone trying to actually drive some of the agenda and push it forward. So how has it been for you, within a team that’s growing and developing, and trying to manage Connections Reform as well, it would just be interesting to get a bit of insight from it.

00:09:23 – Amanda Le Brocq

Behind the scenes.

And I think you know what I said it was on fire, it really has been. It’s an exciting time, it’s an incredibly intense time and I think, on top of building the team out, it was quite a lot for us to really take on. I think what I would say is the whole industry is facing the same challenges – we are all working relentlessly behind the scenes to try and get this done, and I think, particularly for the DNOs, I think there has been a general feeling that this was initially designed with transmission in mind, and we’ve worked so hard to make sure that the distribution voice has been heard, because initially some of the processes and the ins and outs of the reform, it just weren’t fit for purpose for distribution and it was being overlooked. So, we’ve worked very hard as a team to make sure that we’re kind of driving that discussion; we’ve flagged so many things from a distribution perspective that have then, you know, been kind of built into the thinking and thankfully, because otherwise we just wouldn’t be able to deliver the Reform agenda in its current form.

So, my team has been working with NESO and the DNO’s and the TO’s, and they’ve been these implementation hubs, which has been, you know, it’s been fantastic, in concept, it is brilliant because we’ve all got a different piece of the jigsaw – we all need to come together to solve it. There’s lots of brilliant minds all working together and we’ve all kind of got different valuable perspectives, and we can’t do this on our own. We need to do it in conjunction with NESO, we need to do in conjunction with the TO’s. So the fact that we’ve had these implementation hubs, bringing us all together, has worked really well. I mean, we’ve been learning as we’ve been going along, and it’s not been plain sailing, but all the right people have been in the room to try and solve this collectively. And you know, NGED has actually been leading on two of the six work streams that we’ve been leading, on the end-to-end process and also the engineering solutions.

So we’ve been really keen to make sure that we lean in and drive out the right outcomes for the sector, because we’ve got a lot to do in a very very short space of time, and part of this is we’ve done a lot of thinking around how we make this work, making sure that the reform actually translates into the right processes that we can then deliver against a very challenging agenda. But we’re just moving into the implementation phase and we’re trying to figure out what we need to do internally, versus, what we need to bring in externally to get this done. Just redoing all of the offers and working through all of that, I mean, it’s a huge undertaking.

00:12:01 – Pete Aston

So, I guess that when we come to May, or whenever it’s going to be, and all the evidence gets submitted and all the offers get churned out eventually, does that mean that Connections Reform then starts to impact wider within the business, rather than just a sort of smaller implementation team?

00:12:19 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yes, absolutely. I mean within NGED, it’s our DSO team, it’s the primary network design team fundamentally, who’ll be doing a lot of well, particularly primary network design with all of the re-offers. But it’s a collective effort because, you know, my team will be responsible for making sure that all of the guys who are engaging with customers can actually you know, they’re informed, they know what’s going on they can help them through this and step them through the journey.

And obviously you know the engagement that we’re doing and the webinars, just making sure that everyone is clear. There’s a lot that’s going on. It’s complex. It’s moving very rapidly. So that’s the real undertaking, isn’t it? To make sure that we take customers with us.

00:12:59 – Pete Aston

So, you’re taking customers with you, how are you finding the like, the internal engagement, because I can’t remember how many people are in NGED – five, six thousand is it? Something like that, so you know that’s a lot of people to communicate with just internally on this – you know how are you finding that challenge, you know, because the pace of this is just phenomenal.

00:13:21 – Amanda Le Brocq

Well, as it happens, we have an internal reform webinar with everyone’s invited. Not everybody needs to attend, but we’re doing as much as we can through sort of internal communications and webinars to the messaging that we’re going externally with. We’re doing it internally but, you know, with a slightly different flavour. But this is one of the things that’s been played back to me, is one of the major advantages of now establishing a separate connections directorate is previously that would have been a bit of a sort of off the side of city staff and they would have all had to kind of be up to speed with Connections Reform, so that they can handle that.

But what we’re doing centrally is we’re developing lines to take, we’re helping them, you know, bring them on the journey and give them, in the simplistic form as possible, you know, the highlights of what’s going on so that they’re prepared. It’s challenging because, you know, sometimes I don’t feel even feel I’m up to speed with it and the team are kind of running at a million miles an hour to try and just get stuff done and nail it down before we actually press go.

00:14:21 – Pete Aston

But the trouble is it changes before you’ve even got a chance to implement something. Sometimes it feels like, this comes out, and then you’re consulting on it, and then you’re briefing on that, and then it’s changed like, and then the process goes again – so, it’s just been relentless.

00:14:38 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yes, and there’s implementation hubs, you know, sort of running throughout every single week just trying to nail the thinking down, and I think it’s not until it’s some things have been locked down, can we actually start with implementation. And obviously, the more tha,t that window gets squeezed, the higher the mountain to climb.

00:14:56 – Pete Aston

Well, and we’re currently in another consultation period with Ofgem’s Minded-to position. So, it’s not. I thought it was almost finished and then it’s still not quite finished.

00:15:03 – Amanda Le Brocq

I think since I joined in April, I think there’s been 18 consultations or open letters that have yeah, there’s a lot to keep track of and more to come.

00:15:14 – Pete Aston

And just before we leave that, on the Connections Reform piece, have you, as a business, got a sense of like an ambition for what you’d like to see come out of the back of Connections Reform? There’s so much detail in it and you get lost in the weeds, but have you got any thoughts on, you know, some of those big-ticket items that you’d really like Connections Reform to deliver on?

00:15:36 – Amanda Le Brocq

I mean, the big thing is, isn’t it, obviously we were very British in that it was sort of first come, first connected, and now we’re applying those two lenses of readiness and needed. So, for me it’s right size in the queue, it’s making sure that we’re connecting the right things in the right places as quickly as we possibly can, and you know, I’m confident that where we’ve got to with what reform is the mechanics of it – we should get there. It’s just there’s a lot to do to make that happen and ultimately, I know that there will be winners and losers in this, but I want as many winners as possible and we want to make sure that we can achieve net zero and but also take our customers on that journey.

00:16:16 – Nikki Pillinger

Because there’s also those technical challenges that you guys have as well. It’s not just NESO saying here’s a pot, you know, here’s a regional pot and this is how many people you’re allowed in it. It’s also you guys having to look at your network and actually think what’s achievable. You know, we’ve had some GSBs for quite some time that have been quite broken, so it’s all very well, NESO saying you can have a connection, but that very much has to be played against the fact that you guys also have to say actually no, we have to rebuild this GSB in order for more people to actually connect here, and that’s actually going to take six or seven years. So it’s really having that appreciation that it’s not just going to solve all the issues of Connections Reform, it’s not just going to clear out the whole queue, and that there are still very much those infrastructure constraints that you guys are having to deal with and invest in and get planning for, and actually design on an engineering basis.

00:17:13 –Amanda Le Brocq

There is a lot more to do and this is a big leap forward, I think. But I mean, we know that Reform 2.0 is not far off, with, you know, actually looking at demand. So, I think this is this is a step in the right direction, but, totally agree, it’s not panacea, and there are lots of complexities that we also need to be resolved.

00:17:34 – Pete Aston

Brilliant. So, moving on from Connections Reform, so more generically to talk about, it’d be good to talk about customer engagement. So obviously you engage with customers all the time, but what do you really mean by customer engagement? I don’t know who wants to answer this. And what are some of the sort of key things that you’re doing at the moment with engaging with customers?

00:18:00 – Nikki Pillinger

Mark, do you want to go?

00:18:04 – Mark Baker

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so I think for us it’s understanding more about our customers and in different segments and sectors across the industry as well. So, when we first came into the role, we thought it was important to kind of understand what those different sectors and segments are. Obviously, there’s a lot of focus at the moment on generation and particularly at the higher voltage end of the connections process – so that’s been one of our particular focus areas at the moment. We obviously understand, you know, this shifting dynamic and what’s happening with demand and industrial decarbonisation.

So, we’ve kind of done that sort of initial segmentation exercise to kind of look at those different customer types. But I think it’s putting ourselves firmly into the shoes of the customer and understanding the processes and the journeys that they need to go through and understanding how they view risk and obviously, with reform that’s come in, how that risk profile has changed and that uncertainty that it’s brought. I think it’s important that we’ve got this engagement team in place to kind of be the advocate of the customer as we’re shaping our internal processes and, as you were mentioning there about what happens after reform, how do we ensure that we’re set up for success in the business-as-usual world. So that’s kind of where we’ve come in to join the dots together, understand from the customer’s perspective and help us internally to navigate that risk and uncertainty, but also to support customers with that as well. So that’s really what our role is.

00:19:25 – Sarah Jeffery

We want to bring the voice of the customer in.

00:19:27 – Mark Barker

Exactly.

00:19:27 – Sarah Jeffery

That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do, is engaging with the customers and listening to them, understanding their frustrations, their challenges, their issues. You know, it’s nice to receive praise, but ultimately, it’s listening to the whole package and then bringing that into the business and being able to share that across the business to people that sometimes don’t always engage with customers, because ultimately, we all impact the customer in some way. It doesn’t matter what we do within the organisation, we all impact the customer. But it’s bringing that voice, the customer, in so that they are all aware of that.

00:19:58 – Nikki Pillinger

I suppose you also have customers that are quite hard to reach?

00:20:01 – Sarah Jeffery

Yes, absolutely.

00:20:03 – Nikki Pillinger

So, you know, it’s not like it’s an easy thing to go and talk to people who are maybe sort of more marginalised or less engaged. So, it’d be interesting to know how you guys are kind of trying to do more sort of pioneering activities to reach harder, to engage customers.

00:20:17 – Sarah Jeffery

Yeah, I think so. I know we’re going to talk about community energy in a little bit and we can probably touch on that in a little bit more detail. But when we talk about, maybe, vulnerable customers sort of like in the domestic market, they are more challenging to get in touch with, and we actually have a dedicated team, don’t we, that look after those. You know, we have the priority services register.

00:20:40 – Pete Aston

Is that something that your team manages?

00:20:44 – Amanda Le Brocq

No, that’s in the customer directory.

00:20:45 –  Pete Aston

Oh, okay.

00:20:46 – Sarah Jeffery

So, we have the priority services register. They obviously are registered, and that team then are able to engage with those customers, accordingly, depending on what their needs are. But in terms of managing that, customers that are harder to reach, it’s about understanding the segments that Mark touched on – so it’s understanding the different segments, understanding their personas within those segments and understanding what it is they need and the way in which they engage with us. Everybody engages with us in a different way, you know, commercial organisations probably engage with us on a digital manner, whether that be through email, through systems, very rarely actually pick up the phone, whereas the domestic market tend to pick up the phone to us and come into our call centre, which is in the customer directorate that Amanda mentioned.

00:21:36 – Amanda Le Brocq

I’d say that my team is mostly B2B, and the customer directorate is largely focused on the domestic customers. I think one maybe nice example of how we’ve established this more strategic customer engagement is we did some work with the ChargePoint operators. Obviously, there’s a lot of focus on EV charging infrastructure, and so it was really helpful given that we have limited capacity. There’s this Mark and Sarah, and who’ve only got a couple of people in their teams, but we engaged with all of the ChargePoint operators through Charge UK, and it was a really valuable way of engaging with all of them to hear about pain points and really understand you know, what they’re trying to achieve, what are their key objectives, how are we putting any barriers in their way and what can we do collectively to kind of make sure that we can address those? And sort of out of that came the Clearview charging, which was liberating for them; it meant that they had all the information they needed to submit the right applications for their project.

00:22:33 – Pete Aston

Do you want to just explain what the Clearview charging bit was, because I didn’t know about it until half an hour ago.

00:22:38 –  Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah well, it’s giving visibility of the standing charges. So, I think previously they know that the charge points operators they didn’t know and that actually there’s a huge variation across different geographical areas and we would either deem their projects viable or unviable commercially. So, what they would have to do is submit, you know, many speculative applications and then just kind of, you know, figure out, well, actually, would charging infrastructure work here or would it work better here? So now we’ve given them visibility of what those charges are so that ahead of actually putting in an application, they have the information they need and then they know in advance whether it’s going to be commercially viable or not to locate it there.

00:23:17 – Pete Aston

So, it sounds like it’s sort of a win-win that they get the information that they wanted anyway, and you get less applications.

00:23:23 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yes, and we’re all about the win-win and I think it absolutely is just a great example of it, we’ve addressed some pain points, but actually in the process of doing that, no matter. As well as giving them a better customer experience, we’ve also reduced workload in the business.

00:23:40 – Pete Aston

Yeah, I mean that just sounds like the panacea of what you want to aim for with all of this.

00:23:46 – Amanda Le Brocq

There’s a lot of other examples like that that we’ve already delivered, but there’s more to come. I always see that a place in customer experience and efficiency actually go hand in hand.

00:23:57 – Pete Aston

And with your engagement, are you seeing the same sorts of issues come up for like the smaller business customers, as you are for the larger energy developers, or is it a completely different set of problems and issues that they all have?

00:24:13 – Sarah Jeffery

I would say they’re different, yeah.

00:24:14 –  Mark Baker

Yeah, there are definitely some differences, but I think there’s some common themes that are emerging. So, access to information about where you can connect, having the right frequency and recency of data (that’s one of our big focus areas at the moment), and that we’re looking to drive better outcomes for customers. It’s about having that choice; it’s about having that sort of flexibility and understanding what your risk appetite is and having the right information to help you make those decisions – I think that’s kind of a common theme. Also, understanding what your obligations are. So, we’ve noticed, or we’ve had feedback from customers around certainty around what their obligations are, or people who are working with customers, such as consultants or ICPs, IDNOs representing those customers. So, again, that’s one sort of thing that we’re looking to focus on.

00:25:02 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, I mean, I think there is a vanilla sort of connections journey. So, there are definitely commonalities and common pain points around how we engage with customers and how we show up, and this is part of what we’re trying to achieve is that standardised kind of approach, no matter who you are; this is the same expectation for different journeys, but there’s definitely different flavours. And that’s what we are doing, we’re working with the customer directorate on those customer journeys and making sure that we are mapping end-to-end the right journeys for our customers.

00:25:35 – Pete Aston

Yeah, and that was something else that we’re going to come on to talk about, so that’s a nice segue into that.

In terms of the customer journey, I think was that something Mark you’re particularly looking at. You know, what does what does that mean for you and your team in terms of how you’re engaging with customers on the journeys that they go through? What does that look like?

00:25:53 – Mark Baker

So what I’m looking at the moment is the what we call the major connections journey, or anything that is in the realms of a higher voltage connection, and particularly where customers are going through what’s called the transmission impact assessment or project progression, previously statement works, essentially where you’ve got a larger project that involves us having to work with NESO and get to facilitate that connection – so it’s a bit more of a complicated journey. So, what I’m looking at is the internal processes that sit behind that. But, importantly, what’s the customer perspective of this, where are the pinch points, where are the pains felt around that process, you know, why might be taking so long to find the outcome of a certain part of the process, have they got access to the right people and to support with those, to support with that process and make sure they’ve got the right contact points within the organisation? So just ensuring that we’ve got the right foundational internal processes and alignment and the right people in the right places, and then supporting the customers to navigate through that journey by looking at their external perspective.

00:26:58 – Pete Aston

And how important is it for you as a business around consistency? So, like if you apply to somewhere in the East Midlands, or South West, or South Wales, how important is it for you that those journeys are identical, or is it okay to have like some regional flexibility?

00:27:16 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, I think that you know, I always describe it as the standardisation, it’s almost sort of the certain things which absolutely need to be consistent. It’s like a boilerplate, but then I think that part of the real value of this particularly the spread of our geography and the passion and the local expertise of each of the individuals in the depots, I think that’s a real superpower. And so, giving them degrees of freedom in terms of how they execute against that, I think is really important, so they feel empowered to do it kind of their way. But there’s some non-negotiables. I do think that certain things absolutely have to be consistent, and there is that boilerplate, but I think allowing those degrees of freedom around the edges is really important. I think it’s you can’t do a cookie cutter for everything – I think it’s actually something that is really quite powerful.

00:28:05 – Pete Aston

Yeah, no, that’s good, yeah. So that’s sort of core of consistency, but around the edges, some, you know, flexibility for dealing with each, I guess, each individual customer as they come along. Because I mean, we find this with the clients we work with, some of them are really well informed and you can sort of you only have to, you know, do a little bit to help them. Others are just, don’t know anything, and you’re sort of, you know, having to lead them through the whole process, and I guess you must find that with this as well, that each customer is different.

00:28:41- Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, absolutely.

00:28:43 – Sarah Jeffery

Yeah, they are, you’re absolutely right. I think some customers come through and it’s very light touch because they know exactly what they’re doing; they’ve done it multiple times before and then, likewise, you get customers that come through and have absolutely no idea where to even start, and you’re talking them from, you know, that pre-application stage, trying to navigate them through what to expect, timescales, etc. that might just be all completely brand new to them.

00:29:08 – Pete Aston

And are you working different ways in different parts of that customer journey? So, I guess part of the customer journey is before they even apply. Is that something that you’re involved with as well? So, like the data that customers get access to, is that something that you try and engage with customers about, to see what data they need and that sort of thing?

00:29:32 – Mark Baker

So, we’ve, well we work closely with the DSO as well to look at how we facilitate access to data. So, I’ve been speaking with DSO recently around the tools that they’re going to be making available in the coming weeks, particularly around opportunities for where you might want to connect what your curtailment risk might be. So, yeah, I mean DSO are looking at the longer term, so obviously we’ve got a close alignment with them, and then make sure that we’re kind of communicating that out through our webinars etc. So, to some extent, but our aspiration is to build up that intelligence and insight from customers by doing that more strategic engagement element.

00:30:10 – Sarah Jeffery

I think as well, we’re looking to, so our website there obviously is information material on the website, but we are looking to sort of amend that and change it so that more customers can self-serve, recognising that you know, everybody has different needs and wants to find information in different ways, so be able to self-serve more easily at a time that suits them. So, it’s about understanding as well what information is it that our customers want and need on the website so that they can self-serve for themselves.

00:30:41 – Pete Aston

Definitely.

You recently had a hackathon. Do you want to talk us through what a hackathon is, and what came out of it?

00:30:49 – Sarah Jeffery

Not computer hackathon.

00:30:53 – Mark Baker

Yeah, so a hackathon is rooted in, I suppose, digital development, you know, quickly prototyping solutions for a particular need and, prior to this role I was working in digital, so I bought a bit of that thinking into this role, and it really came about from conversations we’ve been having around you know, how could, how might we accelerate connections – we’ve got the backdrop of reform, how might we make it easier for people to connect, what’s really important to the customer – and I think this is where I had this vision that perhaps, rather than trying to think for ourselves and validate with customers, we go and speak to customers, we bring them into this kind of structured design thinking format to kind of work on ideas and solutions with us.

So, the format of the hackathon was really to look at what’s the problem statement. You know, it’s becoming even more challenging to connect at the moment. We’ve got this backdrop of reform, we know that there’s other things that are going to impede our ability to connect effectively, but what’s really important to customers? And so, this event was over a day, we looked at a broad range of ideas, narrowed it down into a number of different solutions and then looked to kind of stress test those, and with those solutions we’re driving kind of stress test those solutions we’re driving some of those thoughts in different areas

So, I’m a sponsor for a project that’s looking at use of AI in pre-application process. So that’s something that’s going to be coming up in the future and then feeding in one of the other sorts of priority themes for customers around the access to data, as we’ve already mentioned. So, we’re talking to the DSO to look at opportunities for improving access to data. So, everything that came out of that hackathon was what our customers want, what’s important to them, key themes around how you manage risk on projects, how do you get investor confidence, how do you ensure that we’ve got the right quality of data, and what tools and technologies can we apply to the connections process – that’s massively valuable insight. So, I think, on that basis, that’s something we’d want to take forward again.

00:32:52 – Amanda Le Brocq

Yeah, and it’s part of our broader engagement programme, isn’t it? It’s like we want to have more of this two-way kind of dialogue and really, you know, we’re all in this together and we all want to kind of drive the right outcomes. And I think, collectively, the collective brain power in that room is fantastic, isn’t it? Everyone’s bringing something different to the table, but collectively we’ve got a better chance of solving these things than if we did it on our own.

And just to say that, it was actually inspired, wasn’t it, by the Octopus’ ending the gridlock report so we collaborated with them and it’s great to kind of have them on board, wasn’t it?

00:33:26 – Mark Baker

Yeah, definitely.

00:33:29 – Pete Aston

Brilliant, but it does sound like you came out of that with a long list of actions.

00:33:30 – Amanda Le Brocq

We did.

Well, Mark did.

00:33:34 – Mark Baker

We did.

Yeah, absolutely. I think what was also really good was we had a broad range of customers. We were very closely partnered with Octopus, we had a technology company there as well, Volan who were helping us to kind of, you know, review some of the ideas through an AI tool. So, we’re applying that sort of technology lens as well. But the fact that we had that range of customers with different sort of knowledge on the connections process.

00:34:00 – Sarah Jeffery

I think the thing is to Amanda’s point of this two-way communication, we don’t know what we don’t know. You know, we’re sat one side of the table doing the connections journey, and obviously our customers are the other side, and they’re experiencing things that sometimes we’re just not even aware of, and they’re experiencing their journey. We’re a very small part of their journey, ultimately, when they’re looking to connect something and so trying to understand different elements of their journey, that are impacting them, that we could hopefully make life easier for them in some respects. That’s why stuff like that is so useful it’s really, really insightful to get that information.

00:34:35 – Pete Aston

Going to move on down to community energy, which I know is your thing, Sarah, and I know it’s something Nikki’s very passionate about as well. But what on earth is community energy?

00:34:47 – Sarah Jeffery

That is a great question.

I mean, what is community energy? I think that is exactly the question – what is community energy? So, as we said at the start, you know I started the role in June, I sort of took over community energy for National Grid Electricity Distribution in about October time, and that was one of the first things I came in and looked at – ‘what is community energy?’. Trying to ascertain what it is, and it’s so many things to so many different people, and I think you’d probably agree with that.

00:35:16 – Nikki Pillinger

Yeah, so I actually did a dissertation on this for my master’s degree. I did an energy policy degree, and it was quite an exciting time for community energy 10, 12 years ago, whatever that was, and I actually looked at sort of four different models of community energy, of doing community energy. I think probably the most network focused one is where you have a group of individuals who want to connect some generation to the network, and you know whether that’s via like a community share offer, or something like that. That’s the main kind of standout thing that people think of community energy. But it’s also like-minded individuals coming together to have an energy efficiency scheme in their local area – it can be people actually gaining community benefits from something that a developer’s doing, it can be people coming together to have like a group buying scheme or something like solar streets, that sort of thing.

There’s a lot of different ways that people can engage with that and I guess the whole idea of it is empowering communities, but it’s also, like I said, it’s groups of well-meaning people who have varying amounts of time and varying amounts of knowledge, and who needs to actually engage with networks in a completely different and useful way, while not really having that particularly specialist knowledge of really the whole. You know I’ve done community energy – it’s hard, you know there’s a whole host of stumbling blocks that you would never imagine you’re going to come across and that really is where people need the networks to help.

00:36:51 – Pete Aston

So, Sarah, is it just generation schemes? So, when I’ve thought about community energy, I’m just going, like Nikki was saying, a group of customers in it, or people in the community building a small solar farm or something. But are you seeing different aspects on the sort of demand connection side of things as well?

00:37:10 – Sarah Jeffery

Yeah, I mean you could see, for instance, a parish council coming together because they want to have EV chargers within their car park of the village hall. So, you know that could be deemed to be a community energy scheme. There are so many different community energy schemes, and I think it’s recognised that community energy is a definition – there is this sort of you know actually what is it, and I think you’re absolutely right. It is a group of like-minded people that want to do right by the community and in the green space.

There was a parliamentary inquiry that closed last month about unlocking community energy at scale. One of our recommendations was actually we need that you need that definition around what is community energy, because that allows us to be able to unlock a few things. When we understand truly what we mean by what is community energy, it means that we can start to unlock things and I think, from having gone and worked with some of the community energy groups since I started the role, what we’re hearing is that it is really challenging, to your point, they are generally volunteers and that’s probably quite a sweeping statement, but on the whole, they’re volunteers within a community, as the name would suggest, but they don’t know anything about our network. They may not know anything about electricity even they may have to bring a contractor in, and that costs money, as you’ll be aware. So, things start to ratchet up at quite a fast pace in terms of cost.

00:38:30 – Nikki Pillinger

Yeah, when you need that specialist.

00:38:33 – Sarah Jeffery

Absolutely, and because they don’t have the knowledge, and there are things going on in the energy industry, like reform, that you know has that knock-on impact. So we’ve experienced ourselves as an electricity distribution business where community energy groups have tried to connect wind farms or solar plants or etc. and have kind of been caught out by the fact that we have, you know, milestones that different projects have to meet, and it’s really challenging because they need to, they need to be moving their project along at pace because, to our point at the start, we have this first come, first served initiative at today, and so those projects are not as nimble and not as agile as maybe some of the commercial organisations that we have. And so, what we would like to see is for us to be able to have a differentiator around community energy, and in order to be able to do that, we need that definition in place and a register of the different community energy. And then what we would like to see is for those groups to be treated differently so that we could give them more space.

00:39:33 – Pete Aston

So from treating them differently, what does that look like? Because I assume that to a certain extent, you have to treat an application from a commercial developer the same as you would an application from a community energy group.

00:39:47 – Sarah Jeffery

Absolutely.

00:39:48 – Pete Aston

So, in what ways would you have to treat applications the same, and in what ways might you be able to treat them differently?

00:39:54 – Sarah Jeffery

So, I think the way in which I mean it would need to go through Code Mods and licence changes, as you’re well aware. But I think, from our perspective, what we’d like to see is, I think, from an application perspective you know it takes the amount of time it doesn’t it for an application in. I think it’s then when you start actually your applications and you’ve received your offer, you signed that offer. Then that’s when you’re starting to have to put liabilities in place, you’re starting to have to spend money and for those groups that’s a lot of money. You know that this community that’s come together, they’ve either got a grant, or they’ve got some funds, or the community have done fundraising themselves. And then when we’re saying to them okay, you now need to be meeting this milestone here, and they’re saying well, actually we’re struggling with that milestone because we need to go and, you know, needs to go and negotiate this with the bank, and that banks taking longer, they haven’t got the backing of a commercial organisation necessarily.

So, in terms of differentiating, what we would like to be able to do is to be able to potentially give them a longer lead time on some of those milestones. But, that said, we need to work with those community energy groups to understand where they need that support. So first off, we need to get the definition in place, we need to get the community energy register in place, and then I’m already working with GB Energy and Desnes to discuss this as a concept. Obviously, nothing’s set in stone, but we would really like to sort of see this go forward so that we can really empower communities to be able to take this sort of you know philosophy of community energy forward. It’s hard enough trying to get funding, let alone then trying to get forward with the grid connection.

00:41:24 – Nikki Pillinger

Yeah, and I guess you guys have, you know, I have seen within NGED that there are specific people who actually are doing support for community energy groups. So, I think that’s a really positive thing that you guys do, and you know that could definitely be replicated across the industry and scaled up to a certain extent as well. If we are going to try and support community energy groups, you know, we’ve got the TIA threshold going from one to five, which should hopefully make that a bit easier for community groups to progress projects. So, yeah, just really scaling up that level of engagement and support. You know, we try and do a bit at Roadnight Taylor, I do webinars and community energy hour and stuff, but it really is making sure that people know that’s available and also just working with other organisations like Regen do a lot of work in this space, Community Energy England Centre for Sustainable Energy Centre, Energy Wales Technology, you know there’s a lot of organisations who will engage on this level, as long as you guys are sort of doing that with them as well.

00:42:21 – Amanda Le Brocq

We have been engaging with Regen for a number of years, but we’ve recently become members of Community Energy England, and Wales, and we feel that through those partnerships we can help drive so much more progress. I think there’s the awareness piece isn’t there and it’s helping them understand the process, and that’s where we need to differentiate, because they’ll need more handholding, and I think it’s through those partnerships they can fast track some of that and we can lean in as a DNO to really play our part in simplifying and explaining the process, because it is complex for charity groups and people who’ve just got nothing to do with energy on a day to day basis, and the developers who are far more sophisticated.

00:43:02 – Sarah Jeffery

I joke because I came into connections back in 2009, on the transmission side, and I thought it was complex then and I look back and I think it’s a piece of cake in comparison to today, you know.

00:43:16 – Amanda Le Brocq

It’s early days, isn’t it with the memberships, but I do think that next year, as in next financial year, we can start to really make strides and make a difference.

00:43:23 – Nikki Pillinger

That sounds really positive.

00:43:26 – Mark Baker

Yeah there’s lots of innovative thinking that I’ve observed from the community energy group. So, one of the first events we went to in Birmingham, we met with kind of stakeholders in community energy, and you know they’re thinking about quite forward thinking opportunities to talk about blockchain and community energy, and the whole network. So, I think it’s also a really good source of you know other opportunity areas that we could explore for how we manage connections, how we’re developing the grid – I think it’s yeah.

00:43:59 – Pete Aston

I’m afraid our time has run out.

00:44:02 – Amanda Le Brocq

Wow, that went quickly.

00:44:03 – Pete Aston

I know it goes very fast. It’s been absolutely fantastic talking with you.

Last thing, I think just wanted to ask, if listeners have got, want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way that they can do that?

00:44:16 – Sarah Jeffery

Good question. Probably drop us an email, I guess.

00:44:22 – Pete Aston

Yeah, is that who’s email?

00:44:26 – Amanda Le Brocq

That depends on what you want to talk about.

00:44:27 – Pete Aston

Do you have a connections inbox or something like that.

00:44:31 – Sarah Jeffery

We do, we do, yeah.

00:44:36 – Pete Aston

Maybe we can put that in the notes, so that people can contact you through that.

And are there any other, any sort of events or anything coming up this year that people might want to get involved with?

00:44:49 – Sarah Jeffery

Well, we’ve obviously got our Connection webinars, which I touched on at the start, which are bimonthly, I think the next one’s in April, and then we also have our Reform webinars, which are monthly, I think the next one’s in a couple of weeks, and then we have some other things in the pipeline – I don’t really want to commit at the moment just because of reform, to be completely honest with you, we do have some stuff that we would really like to sort of take forward, but it just really depends on how reform progresses. Obviously, we want to deliver reform correctly and right for our customers and that has to be our priority. So, at the moment, yeah, watch this space.

00:45:27 – Amanda Le Brocq

But details of all of our events are on our website.

00:45:28 – Sarah Jeffery

Absolutely, yes.

00:45:30 – Pete Aston

Fantastic.

So, you can look on your website and then we’ll put the sort of connections inbox, email in the notes as well. But that’s been brilliant, so thank you so much, Amanda and Sarah and Mark and, of course, Nikki as well, and thank you everyone for listening and we hope you join us again for the next episode.

Thanks very much, goodbye!