Digital infrastructure planning for National Grid Electricity Distribution

Planning is an essential part of any project but it is especially important when it comes to complex digital projects. Whether it’s making sure that an eCommerce site is live and taking payments so a client doesn’t lose out on sales or making sure a critical application is performing, thorough planning is at the core of any well-executed project.

We partnered with National Grid Electricity Distribution to support its strategy of delivering outstanding operational performance for its customers. Our work involves managing and optimising their entire digital estate.

National Grid Electricity Distribution provides power and manages the electricity distribution network for 8 million customers across the Midlands, South West and Wales. Categorised as part of the critical national infrastructure, National Grid Electricity Distribution is often viewed as the fourth emergency service during disruption.

When two major storms hit the UK in 2022, Storm Eunice and Storm Franklin, the National Grid Electricity Distribution logged 2,787 incidents across their network. Their engineers were called out to 528,724 customers across the UK. During these times of disruption, customers sought live information and they’re likely to revert to National Grid Electricity Distribution’s website for live information – this resulted in the National Grid Electricity Distribution receiving 25% of an entire year’s worth of traffic in just one weekend.

With such a heavy reliance on digital channels to provide reassurance to customers in times of uncertainty, a big part of our partnership is ensuring that their large customer base can access the information they need.

Here are some of the proactive measurements we have in place to make sure National Grid Electricity Distribution’s digital estate can weather any storm.

Supporting customers with a dedicated user journey

During times of disruption, the National Grid Electricity Distribution’s website can be switched to Storm Mode - this readjusts the content and layout of the website to focus on providing customers with key information about the network’s current status. In addition to this, users are signposted to the Power Cuts Application to ensure they can quickly access the information.

Robust application development

Ensuring resilience and performance for an application that provides live information during a power cut is key. At times of high demand, the number of concurrent users and requests can increase rapidly and significantly, reaching 10,000+ in the space of a few minutes.

The application consumes live data direct from National Grid Electricity Distribution, and data import functions take source data and run pre-calculations server-side, delivering data to the client-side application via a RESTful API enabling the application to handle large volumes of traffic effectively.

Resilient infrastructure

Infrastructure is at the core of website or application performance. Our DevOps team works closely with our hosting partner and the National Grid Electricity Distribution team to deliver resilience for large amounts of traffic. During the storms, we upped the number of instances for the National Grid Electricity Distribution site and Power Cuts application by 50%. This is managed by a load balancer, a device that distributes network or application traffic across several servers.

In addition to this, we proactively identified a need to add more CPUs to the database during times of the high volume of traffic. During the storms in 2022, we saw 115x more data than we’d normally receive during the same period.

And, we also doubled the number of caches but slightly increased the cache refresh time – this may seem counterintuitive but it’s a proactive way to ensure the application isn’t overwhelmed.

Ongoing testing

The pre-production and production environments are regularly performed and load-tested. Device testing is carried out using physical devices as well as virtually using an online platform. For cyber security purposes, the application is penetration tested by a third party who works closely with our in-house DevOps team.

A partnership approach

From our work with National Grid Electricity Distribution, we know how crucial it is for utility providers to stay connected to their customers during times of disruption or uncertainty. By tapping into the user journey, our team can proactively identify any opportunities to optimise the user experience whilst ensuring the infrastructure is in place to manage large volumes of traffic.

Get in touch with our team to find out more about our proactive project management approach to digital technologies.