CARING FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
Here at Northern Powergrid we are committed to promoting environmental awareness, best practice, and legal compliance amongst all staff. Our Environmental Policy Statement reflects this engagement. We take our environmental responsibilities seriously and have developed a strategy to manage the direct local environmental impact of our activities. This includes our carbon footprint, the risk of noise, water and land pollution, waste recycling, and the care for wildlife. We also manage the visual impact of our overhead lines, balancing the network requirements with our stakeholders’ input.
Our electrical network will play a key role in the low-carbon economy. Meeting the UK’s carbon-reduction targets will bring substantial change in the generation and demand of electricity. Our region is very active in developing wind and solar generation and we continuously aim to improve the services we provide to generation developers connecting directly to our network. Furthermore, we expect our customers to use new technology in the future (such as heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles) that will place increased and new demands on our network, and we see our role in this changing context as one of facilitation, by adapting our network.
CARING FOR OUR COMMUNITY
We understand that, during a power cut, some customers may need additional support. That’s why we provide a Priority Services Register. There are many different ways that we can help our priority service customers, which includes keeping you as up to date as possible through calls or text messages, sending out our Customer Support Vehicle to provide hot drinks and snacks in your area, and providing a ‘winter warmer’ pack full of useful things to keep warm and safe.
At Northern Powergrid we not only aim to support our customers and communities during a power cut: everyday, through our partnerships with the British Red Cross and National Energy Action, we offer extra support to our customers when they need us.
Our volunteering programme gives our employees the opportunity to support their local communities. Through our Global Days of Service volunteering programme, employees can receive funding from the business for their chosen local community group. Our company volunteering programme sees our people attend events that we carry out in partnership with both the Trussell Trust and Ahead Partnership, where colleagues can help support their local food banks and can help to inspire school students to pursue paths in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects.
Our school safety visits programme and free education resources successfully promote safety and raise awareness of the dangers surrounding electricity distribution to thousands of school children in our area every year.
Through our Priority Services Register, Citizens Advice Bureau Fuel Debt Advisor, publications, support for community foundations and employee volunteering initiatives, we support our customers helping them to save money, keep warm, stay healthy and safe.
CARING FOR OUR CUSTOMERS
As a 24-hour business we're constantly here for our customers.
From our online power cut map and text messaging update service to our 24-hour contact centre and social media pages, we're ready to support our customers when they need us. The national 105 power cut number also makes it easier than ever to contact us if their lights do go out.
Every day we invest around £1 million in managing and improving our network so we can power everyday life for our customers.
We have invested in intelligent fuses and fault-location equipment on our low-voltage network to reduce the dependency on manual operation to restore power, shortening power cut times for our customers.
On our high-voltage network we've carried out significant upgrades to our control system, enabling our network to reconfigure itself automatically to respond to faults, restoring supplies for our customers more quickly.
We are are here for our customers 24/7, powering their lives, and through our customer service commitments, we remain ready to support them whenever they need us..
