Proposed Maintenance Deferral Policy

During High Impact Planned Maintenance DCC systems and Services are unavailable and Parties take steps to mitigate the impact of that.  For example, the processing of SRVs for meter reads and the sending and receiving of Alerts will not function during this time. For pre-payment consumers, they may be their unable to remotely top up and would need to manually enter their UTRN top-up code to add credit to their meter.

For Network Parties the unavailability of Alerts related to power outage and restoration is significantly more impactful where large scale outage occurs, as may be expected in periods of significant weather events. SEC MP293 has been proposed to consider solutions which would see the continued availability of services during adverse weather events.

While SEC MP293 is yet to be formally approved and the solution it proposes will not be deployed until after the 2026-27 winter period.

We have worked with Network Parties to produce the draft Maintenance Deferral Policy and are now seeking wider feedback on key points, including:

• The temporary nature of the policy
• Types of Maintenance in scope of the policy;
• The rights of Parties to apply for Maintenance deferral;
• Decision making;
• The rescheduling of deferred Maintenance; and
• The costs of implementation.

Following closure of this consultation we will present details of the proposal and consultation responses to the SEC Operations Sub-Committee before concluding.