Dear Stakeholders,

As the schools break up you will see the start of our summer safety campaign aimed at ensuring children stay safe around our assets over the holidays. But these messages are also important to farmers and anglers alike, especially as we enter Farm Safety week. Take care and Look Out, Look Up.

We are delighted that this month we received an award for our net-zero innovation efforts, earned a great result for our DSO Stakeholder Satisfaction survey, and our Strategy and Growth director was a delegate on a trip to Japan as part of the efforts towards Net Zero Greater Manchester 2038. Find out more below.

Best wishes,

The Stakeholder Engagement Team 

There is still time to register for our upcoming Local Authority Events in September, with many different local authority organisations already planning on coming along. The event will give you a chance to engage and discuss regional ambition and the potential support ENW can provide to local authorities with their regional energy strategic plans.

We also want to engage on how we can better work with and communicate with local authority street works teams, to ensure that network maintenance is completed with as minimal disruption as possible, whilst keeping the network resilient and reliable for customers.  

We are keen to see as many different local authority representatives from every council area in Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria and the wider North West, so that we can cover as wide an area as possible with our engagement. This ensures that no area in the North West is left out of the engagement process.

If you haven't already - sign up here for the Manchester Event on the 10th of September, and sign up here for the Lancashire Event on the 18th of September. See you there!

Please note: Our Manchester event venue has been changed. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Greater Manchester event will now take place at the Castlefield Rooms, 18-20 Castle St, Manchester M3 4LZ. This venue is around 10 minutes walk away from the original planned venue. There is no change to the time nor date.

Our Strategy and Growth Director Ben Grunfeld joined a team of executives from Manchester, including GMCA Mayor Andy Burnham, at an engagement event in Japan earlier this month. He joined the #GMJapan25 net zero panel alongside Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Panasonic and Daikin UK to discuss Greater Manchester's 2038 net zero ambitions.

Ben discussed how our investments in digitalisation, automation, and advanced voltage management are enhancing the resilience and increasing the capacity of the electricity distribution grid.

This will support decarbonisation and electrification, not only at a local level, but at an international level where these technologies can support other countries and regions in their own journeys to net zero.

We're urging farmers to prioritise safety this summer, after 19 separate incidents occurred on the power network, with the possibility of more going unreported. As well as posing significant safety risks, many of the incidents have also led to power cuts in the local areas while engineers make the area safe.

Paul Killilea, asset and investment director said: “Safety is our number one priority across the network, and we are asking all farmers and their contractors to remain vigilant of the hazards of working near the power network, it could save their lives. 

“We’ve seen 19 safety incidents on the network in the last 12 months and typically, we do see a rise around the harvest time. If it’s your land, it’s your responsibility to make sure anyone working on it knows of any overhead lines or equipment that should be avoided. 

“The electricity network is both overhead and underground and covers thousands of miles across the region. Our one message for Farm Safety Week is to look out and look up.”

Read more...

This month, we once again sponsored the Cumbria Tourism awards where the county's leading businesses, individuals and supporters gathered to celebrate outstanding achievement.

Our Stakeholder Engagement & Responsible Business Manager Helen Norris opened the event sharing our investment plans in Cumbria, the importance of stakeholder engagement, and how Cumbria Tourism is one of our important strategic partners.

Congratulations to all the winners and those who were shortlisted. It was a great evening celebrate the best in Cumbria Tourism 🎉

Keeping our network resilient to weather events and external factors is a crucial part of ENW's commitment to keeping power flowing to its customers. To facilitate this, we commissioned a two-year pilot of the national Communities Prepared programme, run by the charity Groundwork. 

The pilot will initially take place across Wigan and Rochdale with a view to expanding the programme across the North West.

Paul Morris, customer inclusion partnerships manager, said: “We’re always looking for new ways to support our communities and that’s why we’re proud to fund a programme which improves resilience.

The resilience programme will equip up to 500 emergency volunteers, flood warden groups, parish councillors and others with the confidence to prepare, respond to and recover from a range of situations, including severe weather. Partnerships are a crucial way for improved resilience at the local level.

Read more...

Our Net Zero Terrace project has been awarded the top prize for "Initiative – Energy Distribution or Industrial Breakthrough” at The Energy Awards 2025. 

Our Innovation team is thrilled to have won, despite tough competition from businesses like Clean Energy Capital, E.ON, Octopus Energy and UK Power Networks. We were also honoured to be nominated for Net Zero Terrace in a second category: “Energy Project of the Year – Residential Award”.

Representing us at the awards ceremony last week were Neil McClymont, Innovation Strategy and Commercial Manager, and Michael Keddy, Innovation Delivery Engineer. The award was presented to Neil and Mike by actress and comedian Lucy Porter.

What is the Net-Zero terrace project? It focuses on providing affordable, low-carbon energy and healthy, warm homes without upfront costs. The technical solution involves a shared ambient borehole cluster combined with an in-house heat pump for heating and hot water.

Additionally, locally sourced community-owned generation, rooftop solar, battery storage, energy efficiency retrofits, peer-to-peer trading, and participation in flexibility markets, all utilised to reduce overall household costs.The system is operated by a smart local energy system over the DNO network, including home and community energy management systems.

The results for the DSO Satisfaction Survey are in: with the score at 8.86, this is a strong improvement on last year's result. This shows that stakeholders not only value our approach to engagement, but they also recognise that we’re listening, acting, and delivering on what matters. From flexibility to data, and everything in between, this is real proof that the way we’re working is making a meaningful difference.

If you are interested in finding out more about any of our stakeholder advisory panels, or if there is any topic you’d like to see in the next edition of this newsletter, please get in touch with us at stakeholderengagement@enwl.co.uk.

Unsubscribe