Meeting the UK's future energy needs

Maintaining safe and reliable supplies of power, and restoring supplies as quickly as possible in the event of any power cuts is our key responsibility for the communities we serve.

There are two main aspects to this:

• Ensuring that we have access to sufficient generation so that we can supply electricity to all our customers.
• Running our network well so that power can flow to homes and businesses with reliability.

We report in the following sections on the work we are doing to ensure that we are producing the right amount of the right type of electricity to meet the needs of our business:

• Biomass and multi-fuel
• Coal
• Gas
• Hydro electric generation
• Marine energy
• Wind farms

Here, we focus on running our network in a way that ensures safe and reliable electricity supplies.

Electricity is so fundamental to our everyday lives in the UK that when, for any reason, supplies are lost, it is a great inconvenience. We are acutely aware of the importance of minimising the number and duration of power cuts experienced by our  network customers. In 20010/11, on average, our customers received a supply of electricity more than 99.99% of the time.

Quality of service
Ofgem’s Distribution Quality of Service Report, published in December 2009, identified SSE’s Southern Electric and Scottish Hydro Electric networks as the two most successful electricity distribution companies in Great Britain. This reflects our  investment in the automation of our networks and effective operational responses to electricity supply interruptions.

Investment
Our capital expenditure in our electricity networks during 2010/11 was £328.5m.