#H2Explainer: So, what is a smart gas network?

That role is often less well known than in other areas of the energy sector. 

Crucially these projects are also finding new ways to integrate the operations of gas and electricity network infrastructure to support those technologies, which increasingly work across the traditional boundaries of our energy system.

It’s vital to bring together electricity and gas grid operators, along with stakeholders such as local authorities, gas and electricity producers and users, so that the UK’s energy networks can work more efficiently and ensure that customers can get the energy they need, whenever they need it. 

Take, for example, wind and solar farms connected to a local electricity grid. The amount of electricity that those sites generate varies from hour to hour, day to day and season to season, in accordance with the weather. But for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, we need to ensure that not only the quantity of electricity fed into the grid matches the demand for it from our homes and businesses, but that that supply remains stable too.  

Flexible power plants, which use natural gas today but, in the future, could use hydrogen or biomethane instead, play an important role in producing electricity for those times when the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine, ramping production up and down as and when needed. 

And that’s where gas network innovation is already coming in; Britain’s gas grid companies are at the cutting edge of gathering, analysing and using data to more accurately forecast when flexible power plants will be used, which enables the gas grid that supplies them and the electricity grid that they deliver power to, to be run more efficiently. It allows network companies to plan more accurately for the building of new network infrastructure which in turn allows more renewable energy projects to be connected to the grid, at lower cost - all whilst increasing its capacity. 

Gas networks are also finding new ways for green gas producers, like biomethane plants, to supply more renewable energy, more consistently into the gas grid throughout the year, to help displace natural gas. They are using data to understand how a combination of different gases in the gas grid, whether it be biomethane or hydrogen, combined with natural gas, will behave in real-time, allowing network operators to increase the amount of them being used in our homes, businesses and communities.

And they’re pioneering new hybrid heating systems, which allow homes to switch between gas and electricity for their heating and hot water, allowing them to use renewable electricity to keep their homes warm when it’s been generated - whilst still having the safety of gas for those times when it’s not. 

We’ll be profiling this work over the coming weeks in our #H2Explainer blog series, but if you want to read more today, we’ve set out that work in a new document, ‘Introducing Britain’s Smart Gas Grid’, which you can find to the right of this page.