What is Celsius?

What is Celsius?

A two-step structured approach gathered data to increase our understanding of thermal behaviour and release capacity to customers.

With greater knowledge of the behaviour of these assets, we can support the connection of increasing numbers of low carbon technologies more quickly and at lower cost.

Firstly, using load monitoring and improved technology to measure temperatures, we gathered data across a range of environmental, load and seasonal factors from 520 distribution substations, which we selected to be representative of 80% of the substation population in Great Britain.

The output from this work is a simple ‘Thermal Ratings Tool’ which accurately indicates an asset’s internal operating temperature using low cost external retrofit sensors. This knowledge enables us and other network operators to release the maximum capacity from existing assets without degrading their health and reliability.

The second stage of the project released additional capacity through a range of retrofit cooling technologies. We explored a range of technologies which were trialled at 100 of the monitored distribution substations and demonstrated the benefits of each. This resulted in a ‘buy order’ of technologies for network operators to choose from.

The cooling technologies were deployed at substations close to where our customers live and work, so as part of the Celsius project we carried out a programme of customer engagement to understand if our customers found the proposed cooling solutions acceptable compared to traditional solutions.

Throughout the Celsius project, we generated a number of outputs which we have shared with other network operators to encourage quick and effective implementation across Great Britain which can be found in our project library.

The project ran from January 2016 until March 2020.

Find out more about the two-stage approach and the Celsius trials.