What London Grid Distribution does

London Grid Distribution is not a real company. It is a fictional distribution network operator (DNO) created specifically for this course. It is based on the structure, responsibilities, and challenges of real DNOs in Great Britain, but no real company's internal details, commercial information, or staff are used.

Using a fictional company gives the course freedom to explore realistic scenarios without pretending to know the inside of any actual organisation. When the course says "London Grid's control room does X," that is a teaching scenario, not a claim about a real company.

The fictional company is modelled on a mid-sized DNO responsible for the electricity distribution network across Greater London. It manages roughly 40,000 kilometres of underground cables, 200 major substations, and serves approximately 3.5 million homes and businesses. It employs around 4,000 people.

London Grid Distribution has one core job: keep the electricity flowing to every home and business in its area, safely and reliably, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That single sentence hides an enormous amount of work.

Monitoring the network. A control room operates around the clock, watching the state of every major substation and cable in the network. If a fault occurs, operators need to know within seconds so they can reroute power and send engineers.

Fixing faults. When a cable fails or a substation trips, field engineers are dispatched to find and repair the problem. In a city as dense as London, faults are often underground, which makes them harder to locate and slower to fix than faults on overhead lines in rural areas.

Connecting new customers. Whenever a new building, housing development, or commercial site needs an electricity supply, London Grid manages the connection. This involves designing the connection, installing cables, and commissioning the supply.

Maintaining and upgrading the network. Cables, transformers, and switchgear have limited lifespans. The company runs a continuous programme of inspection, maintenance, and replacement to prevent equipment from failing before its time.

Planning for the future. London's electricity demand is changing. More electric vehicles, more heat pumps, more data centres, and more solar panels on rooftops all change the pattern of demand and the direction of power flow. The company needs to plan years ahead to make sure the network can cope.

London Grid is not just engineers and cables. It is a large organisation with many different kinds of work. Here are some of the roles you will meet as the course progresses:

Control room operators sit in a room full of screens showing the real-time state of the network. They are the people who decide what to do when a fault happens: which circuits to switch, how to reroute power, and when to send engineers. Think of them as air traffic controllers for the electricity network.

Field engineers are the people who go out to substations, dig up roads, and physically fix or replace equipment. In London, much of the network is underground, so this work often involves excavation in busy streets.

Connections engineers design and plan new connections. When a developer wants to build 500 flats and needs electricity, a connections engineer works out how to supply them without overloading the existing network.

Data analysts work with the enormous amount of data the network generates: power flows, fault histories, asset condition records, weather data, and demand patterns. They help the company understand what is happening now and predict what will happen next.

IT and operational technology teams look after the computer systems that the company runs on. Some of these systems are traditional IT (email, finance, HR), while others are specialised operational technology (OT) that directly controls physical equipment on the network.

Regulation and compliance staff make sure the company meets its obligations to the energy regulator (Ofgem), the government, and its customers. This includes reporting on performance, managing price controls, and responding to policy changes.

London Grid depends on several major computer systems to do its work. These systems are important because later in the course, the enterprise architecture work will need to consider how they connect, where data flows between them, and what happens when they need to change. Here is a plain-language introduction to each one.

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is like a heart monitor for the electricity network. It collects readings from sensors on substations and cables in real time and displays them on the control room screens. Operators use SCADA to see what the network is doing right now: which circuits are live, what the voltage is at each point, and whether anything is abnormal. SCADA can also send commands back to equipment, such as opening or closing a switch remotely.

DMS (Distribution Management System) is the brain that helps operators manage the network. While SCADA shows you the raw readings, DMS adds intelligence: it can model what would happen if you switched a circuit, suggest the best way to reroute power during a fault, and help operators make faster decisions. Think of SCADA as the dashboard and DMS as the satnav.

GIS (Geographic Information System) is a detailed digital map of every cable, substation, transformer, and connection point in the network. When an engineer needs to know exactly where a cable runs under a street, or a planner needs to design a new connection, they use GIS. It is the company's single source of truth for where everything is physically located.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) handles the business side: finance, procurement, HR, payroll, and asset management. When the company orders a new transformer, schedules a maintenance crew, or processes an invoice, ERP is involved.

OMS (Outage Management System) tracks faults and customer outages. When a customer calls to report a power cut, OMS logs the report, links it to the affected area of the network, and tracks the fault from initial report through to restoration. It is the system that tells the company how many customers are off supply and for how long.

“SCADA is the heart monitor. DMS is the satnav. GIS is the map. OMS is the fault tracker. ERP is the business backbone. Each one does something different, but they all need to share data to work properly.”

Simplified summary of core DNO systems - Operational technology and IT landscape

These systems were often built or bought at different times, by different teams, from different vendors. Getting them to share data reliably is one of the biggest technical challenges a distribution company faces, and one of the reasons enterprise architecture matters.

For decades, electricity distribution was a one-way system. Power stations generated electricity, the transmission network carried it across the country, and distribution companies delivered it to homes and businesses. Power flowed in one direction: from large generators, through the network, to consumers.

That model is breaking down. Three forces are driving change:

Clean Power 2030. The UK government has committed to decarbonising the electricity system by 2030. This means far more renewable generation (wind and solar), far less gas and coal, and a fundamentally different pattern of electricity supply. Renewables are less predictable than gas plants, which makes balancing the network harder.

Two-way power flow. Millions of homes and businesses are now generating their own electricity with rooftop solar panels. When they produce more than they use, the surplus flows back into the distribution network. This means electricity now flows in both directions: from the grid to homes, and from homes back to the grid. The network was not designed for this. Equipment, protection systems, and monitoring tools all assumed one-way flow.

Electrification of heat and transport. The shift to electric vehicles and heat pumps will massively increase the amount of electricity that homes use. A single fast charger for an electric vehicle can draw as much power as an entire house. If every home on a street installs a heat pump and an EV charger, the local cables and transformers may not be able to cope without reinforcement.

Together, these three forces mean that London Grid Distribution cannot just maintain its existing network. It needs to transform how it plans, operates, and invests. That transformation touches every part of the company: business processes, computer systems, data, skills, and organisational structure. Managing that kind of cross-cutting change is exactly what enterprise architecture is for.