Datasets of Primary Substations Integrated with Household Heating Information in the UK Mainland

The growing demand for electrified heating, electrified transportation, and the more power-demanding data centres for Artificial Intelligence challenge distribution networks. If electrification projects are carried out without considering the electrical distribution infrastructure, there could be unexpected financial losses. A dataset containing real-world distribution network information is required for this consideration. On the other hand, social data, such as household heating composition, are closely coupled with people's lives. Studying the coupling between the energy system and society is important in promoting social welfare. To fill these gaps, this paper introduces two datasets. The first is the fundamental dataset for the distribution networks in the UK mainland (UKM), collecting information on the firm capacity, the peak demand, locations, and the parent transmission node (the Grid Supply Point, namely GSP) for all primary substations (PSs). PS is a crucial part of the UK distribution network and is also at the lowest voltage level with publicly available data for most UK DNOs. Firm capacity and peak demand facilitate understanding of the mining room of the existing network; the parent GSP information helps link the dataset of distribution networks to datasets of the transmission network. These datasets are collected, processed, and merged from various files published by the six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in the UKM. There are inconsistencies among the names of PSs across several files even within the same DNO. A Python script and manual validation are performed to carefully process and merge the corresponding PS information. The second dataset extends the fundamental network dataset, linking each PS to the information on the number of households using different types of central heating recorded in the census data, an essential dimension closely related to people's lives. The derivation of the second dataset is based on the locations of PSs collected in the fundamental datasets with appropriate assumptions. The derivation process may also be replicated to integrate other social datasets. If you are interested and would like to use this dataset. Please cite our paper: "Datasets of Primary Substations Integrated with Household Heating Information in the UK Mainland", Yihong Zhou, Chaimaa Essayeh, and Thomas Morstyn, 2024, submitted to Data in Brief. The paper encloses a detailed description of all the files and methods for processing and deriving our data. The paper above also describes the values, applications, possible extensions, and limitations of the released datasets.

Zhou, Y., Essayeh, C., & Morstyn, T. (2024). Great Britain Primary Substation Datasets (v1.0.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10806804