Multi-million pound investment planned to protect North West electricity infrastructure this winter

Power grid operator, Stockport and Warrington-based Electricity North West, has announced a multi-million pound programme of investment to protect the region’s network this winter.

Following disruption across rural parts of Northern England last winter during Storm Arwen and other severe storms, Electricity North West has announced it has begun a £6 million programme of works to make the power grid more resilient. Work to overhead and underground cabling will protect it from damage and make it quicker to restore power if damage occurs. Investment will also fund the pruning of trees close to cables and improve flood defences around infrastructure.

Stephanie Trubshaw, Electricity North West customer director, said:

“Our winter preparation and investment focuses on four key areas: preventing power cuts from happening through resilience, improving automatic restoration within three minutes, enabling us to restore power remotely from our control room and helping our teams to make repairs on site as quickly and safely as possible.

“The last storm season provided unprecedented challenges for our teams and customers, causing significant damage to the network, which impacted both repair and restoration times. During Storm Arwen, our automatic systems restored 18,000 properties within three minutes, and our engineers restored more than 90% of properties within 48 hours, but we will keep investing to minimise the impact of storms as much as possible. The investment will also provide us more information about when and where equipment is damaged so that we can give more accurate updates to customers affected.”

As part of its preparations for winter, Electricity North West is also delivering information leaflets through the doors of all its customers, sharing advice on how to get ready for winter and what to do in the event of a power cut, including calling the free power cut helpline: 105.

Electricity North West has also revealed that its portion of electricity bills, which funds maintenance and upgrades to the region’s power network, will also fall by at least 5.5% from 2023, despite increasing investment in the network by 33% to £1.8bn over a five-year period.

Stephanie added:

“We appreciate that this is a worrying time for bill payers, with energy prices forecast to keep rising in the coming months, and we are committed to reducing our part of the annual energy bill, while maintaining the highest standards of service.

“We’re building a network that’s fit for the future as the region moves towards net zero, delivering reliable energy for communities and businesses across the North West, and our winter preparation is part of how we do that.”