Helping National Grid engage with local communities

Markets

Power & renewables
Location

UK
Client

National Grid
Completion date

March 2024

Chris Derbyshire

Principal Account Manager – Creative Design, Manchester, UK contact form+44 1925 23 8091

Mike Dunlop

Principal Producer, contact form

Creating a visualization solution to help stakeholders understand how energy grid upgrades will impact them

As our world changes, so do our energy needs.

Whether electric vehicles, computing, or renewable energy, the electricity grids that connect us with power are under more strain than ever. And as our population keeps growing, and we transition towards more sustainable forms of power, this pressure will only increase.

To ensure a steady and efficient supply of energy in the coming decades, the National Grid is currently in the process of upgrading key sections of the UK’s energy network. These works – part of the ‘Great Grid Upgrade’ – include the construction of new high-voltage pylons to carry energy across the countryside and into homes, businesses and communities across the UK.

We partnered with National Grid at the beginning of 2023 to help them develop new and improved ways of communicating these engineering works to the public and enable honest and productive conversations about how they might impact local communities.

Supercharged communication

There are a couple of traditional techniques for communicating this kind of work:

Maps and technical diagrams – highly accurate, but often difficult for a non-technical audience to understand. Tend to focus on data that is important for construction, rather than data that might be important to the local community.
2D visualizations – more evocative, but time-consuming to produce. With an infinite number of views for a complex piece of infrastructure, 2D visualizations can only ever capture a fraction of the available data.

To overcome these limitations, we worked with National Grid to develop a more sophisticated way of visualizing future works that used 3D modelling to map a proposed grid upgrade in the South-East.

This solution displays the entire route in map format, but also allows users to zoom in for a 360-degree street-view style perspective of any point along the proposed route and navigate the environment as if walking. This allows stakeholders to examine the new pylons from any angle they like, be it their back garden, their place of work, or their favorite dog walk. They can also search for specific locations via postcode and / or Pylon reference. As a result, stakeholders are empowered to assess the real impact of the scheme on their community, as opposed to guessing based on limited information.

Accuracy where it matters

Visualization tools are only as valuable as the data they contain. And local residents are very well-equipped to spot inconsistencies that could reduce trust in the information being communicated.

To combat this challenge, we worked closely with partners to ensure a very high degree of accuracy inside the model. For example, trees and hedges within 20 meters of the pylons are rendered with 95% accuracy of position, size and shape (and are 90% accurate everywhere else). We also built in a summer/winter toggle button, so that users could examine the landscape with 95% of the leaf cover missing. This level of accuracy is vital, providing critical data on how visible pylons would be and to what degree they would by hidden both in summer and winter.

The purpose of this is to help inform the community – reducing fearmongering and enabling informed conversations about impact, challenges, and potential mitigations. This is key not just to securing community assent, but for decision-making. For example, in one instance where a stretch of pylons needed to pass through an area of outstanding natural beauty, National Grid were exploring the option of moving the cabling underground. This would have significantly reduced the visibility of the infrastructure but was much more expensive. Here, the team built in a toggle feature so that stakeholders could compare the landscape with conventional pylons, and with buried cables, and make an informed comparison. This involved more than just removing the modelled pylons - including actions such as removing trees that would need to be felled during construction and modelling proposed mitigation planting to more accurately reflect how it would change to the landscape.

Explorable area 889 km²

Pylons mapped 1,427

Pieces of vegetation 22m

Visualizing the future

National Grid successfully deployed our visualization solution during public consultations for upgrades in the southeast. The program was loaded onto large touchscreen tables with a quick tutorial, allowing groups to explore together and discuss the proposed changes. This helped them gather a large quantity of valuable feedback, which should support timely delivery of the project by surfacing potential issues now and reducing the probability of misinformation.

The software has been so successful as a communication tool that National Grid are now looking at other ways it might deliver value, such as for internal awareness and design proposals.

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