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Guiding the UK’s Power Grid From Now to Next

Jonathan Martin

September 01, 2020


Did you plan to move more of your business online this year? Today, please. Plan to build out your IoT infrastructure with each new project? Today, please. With the pandemic, all our plans to enhance our connections with suppliers and customers by going digital suddenly became more urgent than ever as those relationships snapped to fully digital almost overnight.

As business leaders, we need to work on today’s needs as well as tomorrow’s. We’re doing that right now with Optimise Prime, a cross-industry consortium formed to respond to a government challenge in the UK to build systems for commercial electric vehicles (EVs). They want to work now on saving money for electricity customers and reducing environmental impact in the years to come. That means data and analysis on vehicle usage, recharging, energy optimization, demand forecasting, demand response and on and on. Even how to adapt the program itself to societal changes during the pandemic.

With our unmatched digital and industrial capabilities, Hitachi guides Optimise Prime through what they need now and what they’ll need next. The project meets a range of business challenges faced by our consortium partners, and wider societal challenges such as air quality, climate change and ensuring secure energy supply.

Initial business modelling has estimated that if the methodologies being developed in Optimise Prime prove successful and are implemented throughout Great Britain they will result in a saving of 2.7 million tons of CO2 by 2030. That’s equivalent to a Boeing 747 flying around the world 1,484 times. Over the same period, estimates say that UK network operators and their customers could save £207 million.

We’re delighted to guide this consortium of powerhouse companies on the world’s biggest commercial electric vehicle project. It includes UK Power Networks, Uber, Royal Mail, Centrica, and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks. And we’d be delighted to work with your team, too, on whatever you need to do now. Or next.

#Now2Next