Working with the electricity industry in times of rapid change - a telecomms user's experience

The public electricity supply industry in the United Kingdom has been undergoing a period of unprecedented change. Before 1990 the industry was wholly in state hands but since then the industry has been almost entirely privatised and there has been intense activity on the merger and takeover front, with most of the industry now owned by nonUK companies. This has produced a challenging environment for large users of electricity such as British Telecommunications. As one of the largest users of electricity within the UK, it is heavily dependent upon the cooperation of the electricity industry in order to be able to deliver new telecommunications services and meet its own regulatory obligations. A particular problem area is in the provision of new or upgraded electricity supplies to its buildings, where it frequently encounters long delays. The new structure of the industry has also afforded opportunities to large users to save money. One such opportunity is triad avoidance, where money can be saved by deliberately running standby generators to support BT's own load, and thereby take pressure off the national grid system at times of high demand. At BT's largest sites, it is cost effective to run the generators manually, although a new web-based remote access system is being deployed which makes it possible to run these sites remotely. At BT's other sites, it is continuing to deploy a remote alarm and control system which enables remote running of generators, both for routine and triad avoidance running. This paper expands on these and other opportunities and problems encountered in BT's dealings with the UK electricity industry.