Simplifying energy distribution across the UK

National Grid · 2025 · In Development

Role

Product Designer

Product

Capability Uplifting Boundary Impact calculator (CUBIC)

Team

Product Designer

Developer

SME

Timeline

Nov ‘25 – Feb ‘26

What if energy regulators at NESO could use internal data to calculate the impact of power changes across boundary lines?

NESO was struggling to accurately quantify how much power can safely travel cross specific "boundaries" in the UK transmission network, which made it difficult for energy regulators to determine if it’s cheaper to build new infrastructure or pay generators to change their output. This gap in their capabilities was the initial need that led to the creation of CUBIC.

I was in charge of the UX and UI design of the tool.

SOLUTION

CUBIC: A dashboard-based energy usage calculator providing data-driven analysis of electricity flow across the UK.

Intuitive data upload and execution

Easy access to jobs and metadata

Dashboard visualisation of executed data

IMPACT

CUBIC is expected to save NESO both time and money in power-associated costs:

  • 7000 watts of energy saved.

  • 7000 watts of energy saved.

  • 7000 watts of energy saved.

INITIAL OBSERVATIONS

There is no centralised and low-cost solution that allows energy regulators to accurately manage power transfers across the boundary lines.

Grid congestion is hard to predict and usually relies on manual and fragmented calculations, via tools like PowerFactory, to balance costs. Initial discussions with energy regulators (transmission owners, policy makers etc..) uncovered some key pain points: