IN Brief:
- Wayl‑Ease is a beta-stage digital platform intended to streamline electricity-network wayleave and asset-consent processes.
- AI-assisted asset identification is being combined with mapping, automated workflows, and digital contracting.
- Faster consent handling could reduce administrative delays affecting network maintenance, reinforcement, and new infrastructure delivery.
UK Power Networks is advancing development of an artificial-intelligence-enabled platform intended to simplify the way electricity infrastructure owners secure and manage access agreements with landowners.
Wayl‑Ease is being developed as a secure digital system for identifying, agreeing, and managing asset consents, bringing together AI-assisted image recognition, interactive mapping, automated workflows, and digital contracting. The project is now in its beta phase, following earlier work to map the existing wayleave process and identify where manual administration creates delays for both network operators and landowners.
Electricity distribution infrastructure crosses thousands of private properties, from farmland and industrial estates to residential and commercial sites. Network companies need appropriate rights to install, inspect, maintain, repair, and replace equipment on that land, making wayleave agreements and other asset consents an unavoidable part of network engineering and project delivery.
The paperwork can become particularly awkward when property changes ownership, historic records are incomplete, or new reinforcement work affects numerous separate land interests. The electrical design may be finished and equipment available, but the project still cannot treat access to somebody else’s land as a minor administrative detail to be dealt with after the engineering has been completed.
Wayl‑Ease is intended to bring those activities into a more visible digital process. Under the proposed system, landowners can upload photographs of electricity infrastructure on their property, with AI tools analysing the images to help identify the type of equipment and its function. Faster initial identification could reduce manual checking and avoid some verification visits where the evidence is sufficiently clear.
The project goes beyond image recognition. Interactive mapping is intended to show where relevant network assets sit, while automated workflows can move cases through defined stages and make outstanding actions more visible. Digital contracting then provides a route for completing agreements without repeatedly transferring documents between landowners, consent teams, legal functions, and project staff.
Chris Lawrence, consent manager at UK Power Networks, said: “Wayl-Ease represents exactly the kind of innovation that moves the electricity system forward. By giving landowners clear, accessible information at their fingertips, we’re removing friction from a process that has traditionally been complex and time consuming. This tool will not only strengthen relationships with the people who host our infrastructure, it will also help us manage the network more efficiently as we transition to a low carbon future.”
The benefit to network delivery is relatively prosaic, which is precisely why it matters. Land rights do not attract the same attention as substations, transformers, or overhead-line projects, but an unresolved consent can still interrupt a programme if engineers cannot gain the access required to carry out the work.
Better visibility should allow consent issues to be identified earlier, when construction sequences, procurement, and connection programmes still have room to move. Discovering a land-access constraint before major equipment has been ordered is considerably easier to manage than finding it when contractors and outage windows have already been scheduled.
The latest phase is being delivered with Digital Catapult, Tata Consultancy Services, and Community Energy Pathways. The collaboration is developing both the technical platform and the customer-facing process around it, with the intention of making asset information and agreement status easier for landowners and network teams to understand.
Luke Sperrin, senior practice lead for energy and sustainability at Digital Catapult, said: “As the energy system evolves, there is now an exciting opportunity to further enhance this experience by making access to information even clearer and the journey even easier for customers. We look forward to working alongside UK Power Networks in developing a user-friendly digital solution that helps prepare the electricity sector for the future.”
Wayl‑Ease should not, however, be mistaken for a project conceived this week. UK Power Networks’ earlier innovation work mapped existing processes and began developing an Asset Consents Platform around functions including self-service contracting, asset recognition, automated processes, and generated mapping. The present development moves that work into a larger beta-stage environment where the technology and operating model have to demonstrate that they can scale.
That creates harder data problems than a prototype. Landownership records, legal agreements, physical assets, maintenance history, and planned network work can sit in different systems and change at different times. A useful platform must make those records easier to navigate without blurring the distinction between an AI-generated assessment and the authoritative engineering or legal record.
Image recognition carries the same qualification. Utility poles and related equipment can be photographed from poor angles, obscured by vegetation, or captured in difficult lighting, while visually similar assets may perform different functions. The AI therefore needs effective exception handling and human verification where confidence is insufficient rather than turning a plausible image classification into an unquestioned network record.
Digital contracting does not remove the underlying requirement for agreement with the landowner either. Disputes over access, compensation, ownership, or the terms attached to particular infrastructure remain legal and commercial matters. The platform’s job is to make straightforward cases quicker and complicated ones easier to identify, not to pretend technology has abolished the complication.
The test during beta will consequently be operational: whether Wayl‑Ease reduces repeat administration, unnecessary site visits, and consent-cycle times while maintaining reliable asset and ownership data. Project teams should also be able to see potential land issues early enough to manage them alongside electrical design and construction planning.
For an electricity network facing larger reinforcement and connection programmes, shaving time from a process repeated across thousands of assets can matter more than a spectacular demonstration on one site. The useful measure of Wayl‑Ease will not be how much AI terminology can be attached to a wayleave, but how many genuine network jobs reach site without land-access administration becoming the reason they are late.
