A highly comprehensive set of rule books govern the electricity system, covering tens of thousands of pages, including detailed definitions of how to connect and how billing works. The rules keep us safe, ensures fair markets, protects the integrity of the system, and move us towards decarbonisation. It takes many years to become an expert, and many careers have been made in the pages of these rules.
Getting even a simple change to the rules can take months, more complex changes can be many years in gestation and then many more in implementation.
It takes this long as everyone using the system needs to play by the same rules and getting alignment takes time - 'it's not agreed until it's all agreed'. There are only a few examples where organisations have been granted sort-term derogations to the rules.
There are two broad categories of change: Regulatory change is a change to the governance rules such as ‘customer refunds must now be issued in 14 rather than 28 days’. A technical change impacts the systems and messages that operate the system. These two changes are materially different, but we apply broadly the same process to both types of change.
Importantly technology does not require everyone to be using the same version at the same time, almost all the tech in our lives can coexist with earlier and later versions, if it didn’t, we’d all be stuck in a perennial upgrade loop.
Given the pace of change that we need over the next decade, a good start would be to change the way that we change the rules. We will also need to change the way that the rules are written, moving away from legal text to systems design languages like UML.
