Charging De-energised sites

To remove the differentiation between energised and de-energised sites, to ensure that customers “holding-on” to network capacity bear the appropriate costs for doing so. To ensure all customers with “traded” MPANs pay for their ongoing connection to the network.

Distributors have an obligation to maintain a connection. Associated to this is the maintenance of the capacity of the connection. DUoS is charged to recover the costs of maintaining the connection and the capacity but it is not charged for de-energised sites on site-specific billing or aggregated billing. The D0030 flow which contains aggregated billing data excludes de-energised MPANs in the counts.

De-energised sites, with site-specific billing, are able to retain capacity on the network without being charged for it under the current methodologies. The National Terms of Connection, at Section 3, do not allow DNOs to remove capacity except with the agreement of the customer. So other customers who are energised are faced with enduring capacity charges whereas any de-energised customers can continue to “reserve” the capacity at no charge. This leads to inefficient cost signals being given.

For aggregated billing, to ensure consistency across all customers, MHHS will cause the D0030 & D0315 flows to be replaced and so there is an opportunity to ensure that de-energised sites are included in that new interface, e.g., as a separate MSID count (one count for energised MSIDs and one count for de-energised MSIDs), such that they can also be billed DUoS.

By adding a de-energised MSID count into the replacement for the D0030/D0314 (currently known as MHHS REP-002) via the MHHS programme to avoid rework afterwards. This latter would mean any deenergised MPANs that have migrated to MHHS should be charged DUoS. This is outside of DCUSA scope to achieve but should proceed in parallel via MHHS (having the count in the interface has other advantages for control and reconciliation even if this DCP to use that data for charging is not approved).