Osney Island Grid Edge Tour

Join us on a virtual tour of the local energy system and one community’s experience of becoming more active about the way it manages its energy use.

Osney Island is a community of 300 households in the heart of Oxford. It is surrounded by the river Thames and served by a single electricity substation, making it an ideal place from which to explore the grid edge.

The ‘grid edge’ – the point at which we connect to the electricity network and electricity reaches our homes and businesses – has a key role to play in helping us reach our net zero carbon ambitions.

On this virtual tour you’ll learn about the way our local electricity network works. We’ll also share the experiences of local people who took part in Osney Supercharge, a trial that explored how changes the way we generate, use and store electricity in our homes and businesses, can bring benefits to energy users, the community and the network.

To start the walk, please click on a point of interest either on the map or contents table below.

Note: This is not a circular walk. It starts from Electric Avenue on Ferry Hinksey Road and ends at Osney Lock Hydro.

Background information

We believe that flexibility at the ‘grid edge’ – where energy is put to use – can help us reach our net zero carbon ambitions as well as bring benefits to people, communities, and the energy network. Join our self-guided tour, in person or virtually, to find out why.

Please note, if you’d like to visit the Osney Lock Hydro site (Point 7), please check their website for opening times.

What is the grid edge?
The grid edge refers to the ‘edge’ of the electricity network, the point at which we connect to the network and electricity reaches our homes and businesses. It’s also called the ‘low voltage’ network, where the massive pylons, cables, and substations that make up the physical infrastructure of our energy system finally reach us. And for a long time, our interaction with the grid edge hasn’t changed all that much.

But times are changing. Increasingly we are not only using electricity in our homes and businesses, but also generating power there too. And the way we’re using electricity is also changing. In response to the climate emergency people want to make changes where they can, and for some this can mean installing solar panels on their roof, using a domestic battery, or switching to an electric car or heating system. This is all happening at the grid edge, the local level, where we live and work.

Why is it important?
What happens at the grid edge is really important because collectively these individual, small changes could have a huge impact. These changes are already well underway, so the way we manage the electricity system needs a different approach. As we decarbonise our lives, the take up of millions of electric vehicles and electric heat technologies, will potentially double our demand for electricity. This will have a significant impact on the energy infrastructure.

To accommodate this increased demand, we could add in more infrastructure, like pylons, cables and substations, which would be costly and disruptive to install. Or we could use the existing system in a smarter and more efficient way.

That’s where flexibility comes in.

Through Project LEO, we wanted to understand how we can use the existing system more efficiently, and in particular whether flexibility at the grid edge can reduce peaks in energy demand and improve the efficiency of the network.

Osney was the location, one of six smart and fair neighbour trials taking place as part of Project LEO (Local Energy Oxfordshire). As part of the Osney Supercharge trial, local households and businesses generated and stored their electricity on their properties, and agreed to share data about their generation, storage and use which was monitored in real time.

This was a first step in enabling us to understand how a local generation, combined with battery storage could help provide flexibility to help meet the peaks in local electricity demand, and so minimising the amount of power we need to draw from the wider grid at peak times.

Join us on a virtual tour of Osney to find out more about the ways greater flexibility at the grid edge can support the transition to a net zero energy system.

1: Primary substation

Reflective questions:

Reports and resources:

Click here to be taken to Google Street View.