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Brian Wharmby is a professionally qualified engineer with impeccable academic qualifications and a wide range of experience. He has had responsibility for engineering many power projects.Brian advised the UK government in the 1980s on the feasibility of disaggregating the supply and transportation of electricity. He was involved in defining market structures for the electricity markets in England and Wales, and in Scotland.He has also been responsible for technical regulation of the UK's energy market for more than eleven years. As Technical Director of Offer (later Ofgem) he worked closely with regulators Stephen Littlechild and Callum McCarthy on all aspects of regulation of the UK energy market. In particular he was responsible for ensuring the technical coherency of regulatory action to develop market structures and improve competition.At Ofgem, he set policy in all aspects of technical regulation including the following:
In addition to defining the scope and performance levels for standards and reporting in the UK, Brian was a member of the Council of European Energy Regulators' working group on Quality of Electricity Supply which reviewed and reported, in April 2001, on quality of supply in the EU. The report is available from Autorità per l'energia elettrica e il gas, the Italian regulator. See the Links page for more details.Future regulation of quality of service to customers in its broadest sense will be a key issue for governments and regulators in the next few years. Coupled with this will be a need to incentivise the medium- and long-term management of network assets against a background of tight economic regulation; Dr Wharmby has considerable expertise in techniques to achieve this.
Brian was instrumental in setting the capital expenditure allowances for all of the regulated transmission and distribution companies in the UK during a series of price control reviews between 1990 and 2001.
Brian was responsible for policy decisions by the UK regulator on support for renewable generators from 1992 to 2000. He was also responsible for the technical assessment of renewables schemes applying for financial support and has contributed to the development of international methods of encouraging renewable energy.
Dr Wharmby was instrumental in supporting the UK government's policy of increasing the role of renewable and local electricity generation, by chairing the DTI's Embedded Generation Working Group. This group reported in April 2001 on the technical and economic measures which must be considered by the regulatory authorities and government if embedded generation is to receive fair treatment and encouragement. The report is available on the DTI's website. See the Links page for details.Since April 2001, Brian has been retained as a senior technical adviser to Ofgem; this enables him to keep abreast of UK regulatory and market developments. He also acts for a range of other clients on energy and regulatory assignments. |
Areas of Expertise
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