Our Discovery project will :

·       Evaluate the environmental and cost impacts of both high value and high volume assets across electricity generation, transmission and distribution, consider current procurement, commissioning, use, and disposal practices.

·       Evaluate the applicability of different methodologies/ techniques for extending asset life using circular economy principles.

·       Recommend aligned assets which have the identified potential to extend asset life for experimental testing in an Alpha phase.

This will reduce duplication and improve coordination around three competition themes:

·       "Evaluating the costs and opportunities of repurposing or decommissioning existing assets" Our project focuses on the barriers, costs, and opportunities for assets to be repurposed, repaired, refurbished, remanufactured, or decommissioned.

·       "Future policy and regulatory conditions as well as market designs to support whole systems approaches". Regulatory commitments and government policy focus on achieving net-zero carbon at least cost. Reducing carbon across the whole life of infrastructure assets will be essential in achieving this.

·       "Utilisation of data and development of new approaches which harness greater value from data across organisations". This project will develop strategies for the digital mapping of assets, failure points, and circular opportunities. It will also lead to shared tools to potentially facilitate exchange mechanisms within the wider energy sector.

Our project partners provides the necessary direct access to the wider energy and international markets: This project brings together transmission and distribution network operators, and electricity generation companies, namely SP Transmission, SSE Transmission, SP Distribution and SP Renewables. These core project partners will be the initial users of the innovation, implementing the identified opportunities for extending the life of assets and providing a clear route to market.

Frazer-Nash consultancy are the expert delivery partner. Frazer-Nash is a leading systems and engineering technology company with extensive expertise in energy infrastructure asset management.

BEAMA (the UK trade association for manufacturers and providers of energy infrastructure technologies and systems) are the final partner, providing expertise on the design and manufacture of assets.

This is the first UK user-led innovation to apply Circular Economy principles in the Energy Sector: NG Transmission and Network Rail will also be key contributors to the project and have been engaged in the proposal development phase. These organisations have been identified due to similar value chains, electrical infrastructure, and assets; each of them are providing significant in-kind support to de-risk the delivery. This collaboration will make it easier to innovate and accelerate identified solutions into BAU.

Problem Bring Solved

Context: The UK Energy system infrastructure consists of thousands of high-value assets at varying stages in their useful lifetime. To transition to meet future energy demands and net zero carbon, record levels of investment in new energy infrastructure continue to be required.

Problem: At every stage of the infrastructure life cycle, there are significant environmental and financial costs, from the embodied carbon in manufacturing and transport to the impacts of operational use and end of life disposal. These impacts are not always well-understood by infrastructure owners resulting in investment decisions being made without cognisence of whole life costs. This results in avoidable carbon emissions, due to the scale of this infrastructure across the UK, and indeed across the globe, this is a significant contributory factor to climate change.

Design and commissioning: There is limited understanding of whole life carbon of major energy assets. This leads to an overuse of virgin materials in manufacture and makes it difficult for the industry to consider strategies for recycled/reused/remanufactured content, lifespan and repairability. It also means that procurement processes for infrastructure assets are not always designed to encourage circular approaches that would have a positive environmental impact, and reduce costs for consumers.

·       Operational use: A clearer understanding of the way assets are managed in use will allow networks to explore options around repair, improving the availability of spares, retrofitting failing parts, and sharing assets through mutual exchange mechanisms.

·       End of first life disposal: When assets are decommissioned, they are treated as end-of-life waste and disposed of as such. The current focus is on meeting legislative requirements for recycling of waste electrical and electronic equipment. Due to a lack of data at earlier stages (around procurement, manufacturing, and use), there may be missed opportunities to work across the value chain to refurbish / remanufacture or pursue higher value recycling options.

Opportunity:

Using a whole system approach to asset management in order to implement innovative circular solutions (to fulfill the criteria of the funding call as detailed in Q3), this project aims to extend the life of assets, keeping resources in use for as long as possible, providing significant environmental, economic and network resilience benefits. There is a clear opportunity to ensure that spend on new infrastructure assets are informed by a robust understanding of environmental and cost data around manufacture, transport, use, and disposal.