SGN will, with support from its partners NGGT, IBM and AWS and project supporters (Centre for Digital Built Britain and local authorities), will research and identify ways to deal with these challenges so we can act more rapidly and frequently to handle the events; ultimately improving situation awareness, business outcomes and delivery value for the industry, our customers, and society.
We will assess what it will take to create a digital twin of the SGN distribution network and business processes that delivers better value to our customers. In the alpha phase this implemented digital twin will connect critical entities, through their life-cycle phases, across the SGN Gas Distribution Network, business processes.
In assessing the creating of a digital team project scope includes:
- Identification and prioritisation of candidate users, user stories and their pain points.
- For user stories assess the data flows/digital threads within and between itself and potentially other organisations to determine what data exists, would need creating.
- Determine how to improve transparency and visibility of SGN infrastructure asset data to stakeholders.
- Determine how to integrate the Digital Twin with other national Digital Twins, in a secure and open way.
- Assess SGNs multitude of IT and OT applications systems that support the business today to determine how they would be integrated into a digital twin.
SGN has limited experience of digital twins and so we've proposed to collaborate with NGGT, IBM and AWS for this project.
NGGT will bring knowledge and learnings to SGN to best align data and digital systems -- they will also be collaborating on the Gas Network Interoperable Digital Twin SIF to share knowledge and bridge gaps around digital systems to enable a collaborative approach around future Digital Twins.
Problem Bring Solved
The energy industry is changing at pace, both business and customers are facing unprecedented challenges. Customers are incentivised to move from fossil fuels to carbon free alternatives, consequently the gas industry needs to rapidly prepare for decarbonising the network and managing a business with fewer customers but a large, fixed cost component.
The gas distributors must optimise their operations in order to safely drive down costs and accommodate carbon neutral fuels, all within ever tightening regulatory constraints. This requires changes that are not incremental. There are big choices to be made. The problem for Gas distributors will be having to model complex multi-vector scenarios to determine optimal solutions. This will not be cost effective nor timely enough using traditional approaches.
Other industries facing similar challenges have used Digital Twins to tackle this complexity. A Digital Twin is a dynamic, virtual representation of an asset and / or process. It uses real-world data combined with engineering, simulation, or machine learning models to enhance operations and support human decision making. Digital Twins rely on access to vast amounts of data that are ideally provided by a data fabric that encompasses the complete Digital Thread (asset lifecycle data).
For Gas Networks a Digital Twin will guide decisions by its employees, customers, the public, suppliers, other energy suppliers and legislators.
Examples of the type of problems a Digital Twin can address:
- Improve gas transmission and distribution network and management by utilising simulation and prediction models in near real time reducing the reliance on human intervention. (e.g., to manage increased variability of renewable gas injection sources, safety, pressure, quality). Simulate and predict maintenance across gas network assets to improve the "first-time fix rate" and reduce engineer visits and the spares inventory that's carried by the field service teams to improve operational efficiency.
- Simulate and predict gas leakage/shrinkage across the network to identify multiple mitigation options to determine the most cost-effective shrinkage reduction strategy
- Modelling calorific value at meter points given diverse network sources (natural, biogas and hydrogen).
- Improve holistic view, visibility, and efficiency of public working sites for key stakeholders and network customer. (e.g., safe site, equipment, traffic volumes, public footfall, safety permits).
The innovation opportunity for SGN and its partners is to test and demonstrate the use of a Digital Twin to enhance decision making across a range of challenges driven by energy transition to a sustainable future.
Impacts and benefits
The existing gas network operations and assets are designed to handle 99% of natural gas on the distribution network. Decentralisation and decarbonisation will disrupt the status quo of managing the demand and supply of gas and the flow of gas in the network. The gas industry digital twin will deliver a number of important benefits to each of the users:
1. Expedite decision-making on commissioning and connecting new entrants injecting low-carbon gas. Commissioning and connecting new producers of low-carbon gas into the network requires approval from various stakeholders such as National Grid, Environment Agency, local councils and the gas distribution network operators. The gas industry digital twin solution will provide a digital network view to these key stakeholders with the purpose of enabling "everyone to know something about the network". The proposed solution would bridge the information gap, which is the major cause of delay, increase the rate of decarbonisation and improve customer satisfaction.
Benefits: Planning-to-commission lead times reduced, improved customer satisfaction scores through speed and quality of service provided, faster adoption of green energy and thereby reduced CO2 emissions, full transparency on the gas source as well as other measurements not currently provided such as quality and calorific value.
2. Managing intermittent demand and supply and cross-sectorial energy integration. A major side effect of decarbonising the energy ecosystem is its dependency on weather-dependent intermittent energy sources (wind/solar). There is a lack of visibility and understanding of how the gas network is impacted by these intermittent energy sources. The gas digital twin solution would integrate renewable generation and wholesale market behaviour to simulate the impact on a gas network to maintain the security of supply.
Benefits: Increased fixed asset utilisation, optimal network planning decisions, increased cross-sectorial coupling of energy network, reduced cost to end customer, increased network availability / reduced outages.
3. Improve public safety: Isolating part-of the network during an emergency or scheduled maintenance is critical for public safety and security of supply. The proposed solution will consolidate the siloed data and allow "what-if" scenarios to be run, providing an optimal route to a particular part of the network.
Benefits: Increased fixed asset utilisation, improved decision-making on critical and emergency incidents, improved public safety and reduced down-time, improved customer satisfaction scores through speed and quality of service provided.
