Good News (SSEN Projects), Energy Projects,
Not So Good News, Keeping the Lights on, the Road to Hell,
Other Project News, GCAP partnership, Sea Eagles
and new Roman floors.
REPORT
By Dr. Miles Shepherd
Executive Advisor & International Correspondent
Salisbury, England, UK
INTRODUCTION
I hope readers had a very peaceful time over the festive season and that the New Year is living up to your hopes. The past month has been a bit of a whirlwind from a project perspective and Santa has brought some early presents in the Energy world. The focus in the run up to the holiday season was on power and plans to decarbonise with some welcome news of innovation and investment but these are set against problems of infrastructure issues and the continuing planning problems.
GOOD NEWS
Scottish and South Eastern Networks (SSEN) received some early Christmas presents as their Innovation Team announced that all their latest project submissions have been approved for a total of £550,000 funding from Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund. Four projects to progress further are:
- Harness the power of AI to better simulate the effect of connection requests across various layers in the network to understand the upstream impact. The project will utilise data on network capacity, current load, and external factors, to present a complete view of overall demand. This will provide network operators with valuable insights to make faster, better decisions on future investments. This will also help network planners prioritise measures to improve connection times.
- RIDES (Rural Industrial DEcarbonisation Support) supports the decarbonisation of rural industries, which by their nature, are often located in places where it’s more complex and expensive to reinforce the network to deliver increased capacity. RIDES will develop a tool to indicate how rural industries can decarbonise and provide networks with an idea of what their future investments will need to be, saving money for the sector and accelerating the move to net zero.
- I-Lad (Innovating Losses Analysis and Detection) explores novel techniques like synthetic data to automate and modernise the collection, identification and modelling of data on losses. Such electrical losses are unavoidable when transferring power across electricity networks, and current technology can only estimate losses, making it difficult to reduce losses effectively.
- 3D-AR combines asset and demand forecast data with advanced weather forecasting to deliver insights into where more headroom can be unlocked on the network, and where assets can be run for longer, and at a higher capacity than current static operating levels. These useful new insights provide a new, holistic view of capacity and load on networks.
These four projects have been successful at the Strategic Innovation Fund’s cycle ‘Discovery’ phase. The Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund is delivered in partnership with Innovate UK.
Still with SSEN, plans have been released to spend £31 billion on updating the power transmission network in the north of Scotland. SSEN claim those proposals could create some 37,000 new jobs across UK between 2026 and 2031…
More…
To read entire report, click here
How to cite this report: Shepherd, M. (2025). UK Project Management Round Up, report, PM World Journal, Vol. XIV, Issue I, January. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/pmwj148-Jan2025-Shepherd-UK-Project-Management-Round-Up-Report.pdf
About the Author
Dr. Miles Shepherd
Salisbury, UK
Dr. Miles Shepherd is an executive editorial advisor and international correspondent for PM World Journal in the United Kingdom. He is also managing director for MS Projects Ltd, a consulting company supporting various UK and overseas Government agencies, nuclear industry organisations and other businesses. Miles has over 30 years’ experience on a variety of projects in UK, Eastern Europe and Russia. His PM experience includes defence, major IT projects, decommissioning of nuclear reactors, nuclear security, rail and business projects for the UK Government and EU. His consulting work has taken him to Japan, Taiwan, USA and Russia. Past Chair and Fellow of the Association for Project Management (APM), Miles is also past president and chair and a Fellow of the International Project Management Association (IPMA). He was, for seven years, a Director for PMI’s Global Accreditation Centre and is immediate past Chair of the ISO committee developing new international standards for Project Management and for Program/Portfolio Management. He is currently Chairman of the British Standards Institute project management committee. He was involved in setting up APM’s team developing guidelines for project management oversight and governance. Miles is based in Salisbury, England and can be contacted at miles.shepherd@msp-ltd.co.uk.
To view other works by Miles Shepherd, visit his author showcase in the PM World Library at http://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/miles-shepherd/.
