OpenLV Community Partner: Application Form

Make sure you have read the Guidance for Applicants before filling out this form.

Note that some answers have a word limit. The tables will re-size automatically.

Contents
  1. Basic Information
  2. Proposed app
  3. Technical information
  4. Your community
  5. Your track record
  6. Match funding
  7. Supporting online information
  8. Declaration and data protection statement

Section 1:Basic information
1.1 Applicant / FOR ADMIN USE: / Applicant no:
Date received:
Organisation name
Correspondence address
Postcode:
What is the purpose of your organisation?
(150 words max.)
1.2 Organisation details
What is the legal structure of your organisation? Tick all that apply.
Registered company
Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO)
Registered society
Parish or town council
Unincorporated organisation / Other legal structure (please state):
Charitable status
Company, CIO or Registered Society no.
When was your organisation established? (month/year)
Number of employees
Number of active volunteers
Number of members
If you don’t have a formal membership (e.g. local shareholders), just enter 0.
Number of people subscribed to any community mailing list you publish
How regularly do you publish a newsletter or similar (e.g. monthly, annually)?
1.3 Contact details
Please provide your contact details. At least one named contact must be a director of the organisation applying, or have the authority to sign on behalf of the organisation if you are unincorporated. We also ask you to provide details for an alternative contact, in case we have any difficulties in communicating with your main contact.
Main contact / Alternative contact
Full name
Role
Phone
Email
Correspondence address and postcode
If this is your personal contact information, please tick and sign indicating that you give your consent for us to store your personal information. / I give my consent for CSE to store my personal information for the purposes of the OpenLV project: / I give my consent for CSE to store my personal information for the purposes of the OpenLV project:
Signature:
Section 2:Proposed App

Outline project proposal

Successful applicants will be supported to develop a software application (app) which uses data from up to three selected substations, where we will fit LV-CAPTM monitoring units for you.

2.1 What problem do you hope to solve?
Please provide a short description of the problem or problems that you think an application may be able to solve, and / or the benefit you think can be created.
Example 1: Local residents are not aware of neighbourhood energy use or how their usage compares to their neighbours’ – even in houses with a smart meter, only personal usage is known. If the community knew when their joint usage was high they could spread their usage out over time. If they knew the typical usage of their neighbours they could be motivated to read up on how to reduce individual demand, because above-average users would know it was possible.
Example 2: Charging electric vehicles places strain on the substation. At the moment, EV owners do not know when it is a good time to charge. If EV owners could see when it was a good time to charge their vehicles they might be able to spread the load they put on the substation over time. (100 words max.)
2.3 What benefits do you think an application could create or make possible? Please tick all that apply.
 Reduce consumer energy bills (via reduced electricity consumption or other mechanisms)
 Reduce costs to the network operator costs of network reinforcements by reducing peak usage
 Improve business case for energy generation projects (e.g. by demonstrating substation capacity)
 Increase use of electric vehicles (e.g. by improving business case for new schemes or by making existing users aware of best times to charge vehicles)
 Use data to explore potential for new developments (e.g. time of use tariffs, waste heat recovery, or increasing revenue from generation projects by maximising generating time)
 Reduce carbon emissions
 Improve community cohesion
 Improve awareness of local energy usage
 Increase local control over energy
 Other benefits (please state):
2.4 For each source of value that you have ticked or added above, please explain how your project will deliver this and who will benefit. (100 words per outcome max.)
2.5 Tell us about your planned users and how the proposed app meets their needs.
Who are the planned users of your app? (e.g. members of the public in your community, local planners and policy makers. Tell us if there is more than one type of user, and why.)
How do you envisage the application working to solve the problem? (e.g. the application would send a text-message to electric vehicle users when there is headroom to charge EVs at the substation.)
What proportion of the population of the trial area do you envisage using your app? (e.g. evidence X suggests there are Y EV users in our area, so up to N% of the population.)
Do you think there is a minimum number of users that your app would need for it be effective? (e.g. a typical EV provides a charging load of X amps, so optimising the charging times of N EVs could provide Y% more headroom on a substation with Z users.)
What would their motivations be for using the app? (e.g. People’s natural civic-mindedness)
(400 words max.)
2.6 Tell us what behavioural changes you think your app will require of your users? Why do you think it is likely that people will make these changes?
e.g. will people using your app need to sign up to a specific energy supplier, or be willing to react to alerts asking them to reduce their electricity consumption at certain times?
(300 words max)
2.7 Is any additional funding needed to develop or test your planned app, without which your project will not be viable? If so what is the extra funding for, and what is the approximate cost? Tell us how you have calculated this cost, and who is providing this funding.
e.g. £4,000 for a display showing energy usage in a prominent public place, or 20 days extra programmer time @ £450 per day.
(100 words max.)
2.8 Now that you’ve defined what you want your app to do, who will use it, and how it will create value, please give us a concise ‘elevator pitch’ for your proposed app that ties these concepts together.
Your elevator pitch should briefly explain your idea, its appeal to users, and how it creates value, to demonstrate why it is worth the OpenLV project investing time and resources in developing it with you.
(150 words)
Section 3:Technical information
3.1 What data sources will your proposed app require?
Data calculated from LV-CAPTM unit outputs:
Total real time power flow to all consumers connected to the substation in kW (every 60 sec)
Cumulative energy usage for all users connected to the substation in a given period (e.g. hourly)
Reactive power and harmonics
Other data from LV-CAPTM unit not included above (either raw measurement points, or information directly calculated from them (please see the ‘Guidance for Applicants’ document for links to the measurement points data sheet):
Data from other parties (e.g. National grid data on current or predicted carbon intensity, meter readings from renewable energy installation, weather prediction data):
3.2 Will your proposed app need to export data to other software or hardware?
(for example to run a display or export to a spreadsheet)
Yes/NoDetails:
3.3 Will your proposed app need to send email or text message alerts to users?
Yes/No
If so what information will they contain and at what intervals/under what circumstances will they be triggered by the app?
Section 4:Community engagement
4.1 What is the name of the community where you will collect data?
4.2 Briefly describe this community.
You may wish to include relevant information about the geography of the community (rural or urban), demographics (income, age, etc.), or housing types.
Remember that the participants will be defined by an area served by up to three substations. We will need to work with you after shortlisting to identify the exact boundaries of the area for which data will be available, based on which buildings are connected to the substations being monitored. (100 words.)
4.3 Please attach a map showing us your proposed project boundary (as described in the guidance for applicants). Tell us why you have chosen this particular area for your project. (50 words.)
Note your area must fall entirely within WPD’s network, which you can check with this postcode checker:
4.4 Are the substations serving the area you have identified
 Ground mounted  Pole mounted Not sure
4.5 Tell us about the mobile phone networks in your area. Is the signal strong / patchy / variable? Is there a provider that is generally better than others? You can use the Ofcom app to check this: (50 words.)
4.6 What is the relationship between your organisation and the proposed project area?
You might be based in this community and draw your membership from the local area. If your organisation is affiliated with a particular building(s) in the chosen area, such as social housing, religious building or a community centre, please tell us. If you are a membership organisation, tell us about your membership numbers, whether they are drawn from across the community or a specific subset, and over how many years you have built this membership base. If you are not locally based, we need to understand what your link is to the local area. (200 words max.)
4.7 Is your organisation already active on energy issues in your proposed project area? If yes, please describe your activity over the last 2 years. (100 words max.)
4.8 How do you plan to get people interested in using the app and maintaining their involvement over an extended period? Tell us about your experience of engaging your community, and the methods and approaches you deploy. (200 words max.)
4.9 Are there any groups of potential users who may be at risk of exclusion from the testing of your app? For example older people, or those without access to a computer. How do you plan to overcome the barriers to their participation? (200 words max.)
Section 5:Your track record

We are interested in hearing about your existing skills, experience and resources. This is to give us an idea how we can best support you. We’re not expecting applicants to have access to all of the skills listed here – so don’t worry if you don’t have a software engineer or community engagement expert in your organisation already.

5.1 Please list the key achievements of your organisation to date relevant to this project.
(200 words max.)
5.2 Who will be involved in developing the project? (please tick one only)
Paid staffVolunteersA combination
5.3 Please tell us about relevant skills and experience of key people in your organisation who will be involved in this project. If their role with your organisation is voluntary, you might wish to also include their technical expertise, community engagement or communications skills gained through their day to day employment outside of volunteering with your organisation.
In particular, let us know if you have key people with skills in software engineering, community engagement and consultation, or web design. If you intend to lead on app development, you will be asked to give more detail on the skills of your software engineer in question 5.4, below. (400 words max.)
5.4 For applicants who wish to lead their own app development.
If you do not want software engineers from the OpenLV project team to lead the development of your app, but wish to do this yourselves, please give us the name and contact information for your lead software engineer. We will want to contact them to discuss how to integrate their technical work with the OpenLV systems.
Name:
Contact details:
Examples of relevant programming experience:
Brief job history (relevant posts only):
Section 6:Match funding

Applicants are required to demonstrate a commitment to the OpenLV project by providing an element of match funding. Refer to the ‘guidance for applicants’ for more information on how to answer this question.

Please outline what match funding you will bring to this project, whether this is a cash or in-kind contribution, and what purpose the match funding will be put to. (200 words max.)
Section 7: Supporting online information

If you wish to provide relevant additional information please provide hyperlinks below to any online material, for example sections of your website or news articles.

For each hyperlink please give a few words below describing the content.
Section 8: Declaration and data protection statement

I understand that:

  • The OpenLV team will use the information we give in this application during the assessment and lifetime of our proposed project to administer the overall programme and for their own research purposes. All information gathered in connection with this application, including correspondence, will be available to the OpenLV project partners: the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), EA Technology, Western Power Distribution (WPD), Nortech, Lucy Electric Gridkey, and Regen.
  • The project is publicly funded via Ofgem’s Network Innovation Competition and therefore details of any products or technology developed with these public funds can be made openly available by Ofgem and/or the project partners. (If you wish to discuss a non-disclosure agreement before proceeding with your application, please get in touch).
  • Images and news stories about our project may be used by the project team to promote the OpenLVprogramme.
  • As part of the project we will need to be able to commit to attending two meetings, events or conferences, for which your travel costs will be paid.
  • In order to effectively evaluate the project, we will be interviewed by telephone at the beginning and end of the project, and may be asked to complete a short survey during the project.
  • We are required to commit an element of match funding to the project.

I am a director of this organisation and I have the authority to sign this declaration on behalf of my organisation.

I declare that the information given on this form and in any other documentation that supports this application is accurate to the best of my knowledge.

I understand and accept the terms above on behalf of my organisations/group.

Signature
Name
Role
Organisation
Date