Sarah works on distribution network constraints and the connection problem, which has quietly become the binding constraint on a great many decarbonisation projects in Britain.
Her group's most requested service is unglamorous and extremely valuable: an early, realistic assessment of what a site can actually import or export, and what it would cost and take to change that. A surprising number of well-developed projects have never had this done, and discover the answer at the point of application.
She also works on flexibility — the argument that a project which can modulate its demand is a considerably cheaper connection than one which cannot. Depot charging for bus and freight fleets is a recurring case, where the difference between naive and managed charging is often the difference between a viable scheme and a substation upgrade.
She is careful to distinguish the engineering from the queue. The technical answer can frequently be found in weeks; the connection offer may take considerably longer, and no amount of modelling accelerates it. Projects that plan for both survive.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
Depot charging flexibility study
Modelled managed charging for a bus depot and demonstrated that a scheduling change avoided a substation reinforcement, which altered the project's economics entirely.
Industrial site connection assessment
Assessed the realistic import capacity for an electrification project, identifying a constraint the developer had not accounted for and a phased route around it.
Power quality investigation
Diagnosed harmonic distortion affecting sensitive equipment at a manufacturing site, and traced it to an interaction between two independently specified drive installations.
Working with Whitcombe
She asks for the site, the half-hourly data if it exists, and the ambition. From those three things she can usually say within a fortnight whether the connection is the project's principal risk, which is worth knowing before anything else is designed.
Her advice distinguishes clearly between what is technically feasible, what is commercially likely, and what depends on a queue she does not control.
Looking for
Sites with a real load or generation ambition and a willingness to look at the connection early.
Probably not for
Projects whose business case requires the connection to be straightforward. She cannot make it so.
Credits and contributions
- Adviser on connection strategy to several industrial decarbonisation projects
- Contributor to a network operator's flexibility services trial
- Author of guidance on early-stage connection feasibility for project developers