The energy landscape is changing fast as the way our customers and communities generate, consume, and interact with energy evolves. Our role is to plan our distribution networks to facilitate their decarbonisation objectives and choices, and to enable their journey to Net Zero.
To achieve this, we need to forecast and understand our customers’ changing electricity requirements. We develop Distribution Future Energy Scenarios (DFES) to do this, which are forecasts for a range of customer demand and generation metrics up until 2050.
Given the uncertainty and ever-changing policy landscape in which we operate, we have created forecasts for multiple scenarios, which reflect differing levels of consumer ambition, government/policy support, economic growth and technology development.
Our DFES documents below describe how electricity generation and demand may evolve in our SP Distribution and SP Manweb regions over the next 30 years.
We also publish interactive data visualisations and map views for both SP Distribution and SP Manweb, which show our forecasts for customer demand, generation and low carbon technologies for selected combinations of DFES scenario and year.
We have engaged with a wide range of our stakeholders. We’re grateful for the feedback received and look forward to continuing to engage with you and hear your insights for our update next year. This feedback is vital to making sure that our forecasts reflect the plans and ambitions of the local communities we serve.
If you have any feedback or an idea you would like to discuss with the forecasting team, or if you’d like more information on a particular subject, please get in touch via: dfes@spenergynetworks.co.uk
Data Workbooks
Our DFES datasets are available on our Open Data Portal and provide detailed information on potential customer demand and generation metrics, as well as outlining how electricity generation and demand may evolve in our SP Distribution and SP Manweb regions out to 2050.
Please note the full DFES workbooks for 2024 can be downloaded via the Information Tab within each of the specific DFES datastes hosted on our Open Data Portal. Should you have any queries, please contact the Open Data team at the following email address: opendata@spenergynetworks.co.uk.
Previous DFES publications
Distribution. Future Energy Scenarios.
SP Manweb. Future Energy Scenarios.
SP Distribution. Future Energy Scenarios. Key findings.
SP Manweb. Future Energy Scenarios. Key findings.