Understanding contract milestones

We developed a simple guide to the implementation of new contract milestones for customers.

The availability of connection capacity is an important issue for the electricity industry. There have been many discussions at a national level about the availability of capacity and, importantly, the role DNOs can play in ensuring that as much capacity as possible is available for customers wishing to connect to the distribution network.

Ofgem decided that connection customers in general would benefit from a regime which allows capacity that had previously been allocated to a customer, to be withdrawn if there was a lack of progress and the capacity was not being used as originally intended.

As an industry, we introduced effective new milestones that would give DNOs the ability to reallocate sterilised capacity. It is important that our customers understand how these contract milestones work as they can have an impact on their projects. Last year, along with other DNOs, we contributed to the development of the ENA best practice guide on the implementation of new contract milestones. At one of our Connections Customer Forums a customer asked us for a simple guide to these new contract milestones that they could share with clients to help them understand the new process and any associated risks. We therefore made a commitment to develop our own simple guidance to how contract milestones work. We produced our simple guide to contract milestones in August 2017 and published and promoted it via our website.

You can read our 'Simple guide to contract milestones at www.northernpowergrid.com/downloads/3664