National Grid’s digital twin and data visualisation project was a necessity created to transform how it models demand and plans the electricity network of the future.
The utility’s web-based tool, known as Triton, is a digital twin and data visualisation tool that replaced highly manual, labour-intensive and time-consuming electricity network modelling.
Before Triton’s introduction, highly skilled power systems engineers would spend hours modelling demand and supply using spreadsheets, with information from various sources, including distribution network operators (DNOs), which own and operate local electricity distribution networks.
National Grid provides the infrastructure for electricity distribution in England. It does what David Adkins, head of network architecture and innovation at the utility, described as “the really big [high-voltage] stuff”, while DNOs do lower-voltage networks, down to the home.
By creating a digital replica of National Grid’s physical infrastructure and designing Triton to process and manage this data, the organisation has made a 70% time saving.
Urgent need
A tool like Triton became an urgent business need a few years ago, when, after years of steady demand for electricity and new electricity generation, it began to increase dramatically. National Grid now predicts a doubling of demand by 2050.
Adkins, who oversees a portfolio of innovations worth over £130m, which include products such as Triton as well as physical initiatives, is tasked with designing the electricity network of the future in an era of huge change and increasing demand.
National Grid needs to understand where the demand is coming from so it can make – often huge – investments, in the right places.
These challenges are why the idea for Triton came about. “It was a needs case,” said Adkins. “In order to support all of the changes, we wanted to have much better understanding of what the demand profile was across the whole country, all the way down into those DNO networks and to homes.
“In the past, we had people doing lots of spreadsheet work, trying to figure out where demand was, trying to figure out which substations are being used,” he added. “We’d just see some big numbers, so we wanted to really press into those numbers and it took people months to go through these exercises.”
Carrie Mannering, who worked on the project as National Grid’s digital product line director, said modelling was a task that would take over a year to complete.
“To do each region and to do it annually, or to the cycle that’s needed, it would take more than a year,” she said. “It was manual and very labour intensive.”
Part of the complexity emanates from the number of sources of data National Grid is using to model demand. It receives data from third parties, and today there are many more, said Adkins, a power systems engineer by profession.
“We are getting data from the DNOs, we’ve got our own data and there’s other people that do future scenarios that we also want to compare,” he said. “In the past, we only used to have a small number of people trying to connect to the network. [Our] focus would be very small, and we’d need to understand the five or 10 sites that something interacts with, whereas we now need to do it for the whole system, all 240 of our substations and all thousands DNO sites.”
Adkins said it was no longer possible to use people and spreadsheets. “That’s what birthed the need for Triton and various other tools that we have,” he said.
Mannering said data also taken in includes all of the regional plans for things such as transport and infrastructure.
“It’s continually iterative as different governmental plans come in and different regional plans come in,” she said. “And it’s how we try to do the right thing for the consumer, ultimately, and for Great Britain in terms of ensuring that we can meet the demand.”
The idea for Triton began in the Net Zero engineering team at National Grid, said Mannering.
She said part of the challenge was the limited number of people with the skills to do the work. “Power system engineering is a really specialised expertise and there are not millions of people with those skills hanging around,” added Mannering.
She said Triton doesn’t make the decision for the power system engineers, but “allows them to do things more efficiently and more consistently, and then have records of all the different options that they’ve modelled”. Mannering added that it also makes it easier to illustrate plans to stakeholders through the digital twin aspect.
Through Triton and other tools, National Grid can run network scenarios that significantly accelerate planning, reducing the time needed to analyse and decide on where to reinforce the network by 70%.
Triton rises
With the requirements defined by the power systems engineers and working alongside IT services company Atos, the project began in 2023, and was completed in February 2025.
Mannering described Triton it as “a web-based tool”, and a very secure one at that, after going through regulatory inspection. “As you’d expect with an organisation like us that deals with critical national infrastructure, we follow really stringent security processes,” she said. “Before we do anything, we have a thing called the Solution Design Authority that kind of gives us security and architectural oversight.
“But essentially, it’s a web-based tool that kind of pulls on the various data sets, and then there’s a refresh of those data sets as obviously they get updated from the various DNOs,” said Mannering.
She added that, at National Grid, there are hundreds of IT professionals. Part of this is the digital team, which embeds within the organisation.
“There’s a central IT and digital team that look after many facets of the organisation from site operations through to security,” said Mannering. “But our federated model means that there’s somebody like myself, a product line director, that would sit within each of the business units along with product teams.”
