Project Summary

CReDo+ is a novel enhancement of the original Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) climate change adaptation decision support tool, with a primary focus of extending to the emerging risk of extreme heat. CReDo+ will scale up across the energy sector and develop a user-friendly platform for asset experts to quantify their combined tacit knowledge of risk under extreme weather conditions into new statistical models. By connecting

these asset impact models across the network, CReDo+ will capture a system level view of cascading risk, enhancing the ability of network operators and wider connected asset owners to build systemic climate resilience and robustness

Innovation Justification

Alignment with Innovation Challenge

By connecting asset models across energy networks, CReDo+ will capture a system level view of cascading risk. This connected decision support tool will enhance the ability of network operators and wider connected asset owners to build systemic climate resilience and robustness, addressing Challenge 3 Scope 2. CReDo+ will develop connected decision intelligence capability to ensure secure, robust, and affordable future energy networks resilient to climate change impacts, supporting the UK transition towards Net Zero and beyond.

 

CReDo+ is a novel solution and will:

1. Address data gaps in understanding asset behaviour by creating new probabilistic failure models for extreme heat.

2. Increase the granularity of data available to DNOs for their assets and identify interdependencies with other utilities’ assets to inform cross-sector resilience approaches.

3. Incorporate economic and societal cost data to quantify the implications of failure, such as costs of recovery, repair, impact on supply, to support the investment case for building whole system resilience.

4. Prototype a user-friendly digital elicitation tool to create asset impact risk models extensible to other assets and risks. These models do not currently exist, as discussed in Question 2.

5. Implement the risk models in the CReDo technology to provide a new understanding of predictability, robustness, and quantificati

During Alpha we will improve the technology from TRL 2-3 to TRL 4-6.

 

Learnings from Discovery Phase, which shaped Alpha Phase

· We learnt the strategic focus of UKPN and other DNOs in relation to climate adaptation focusing on operational impacts.

· Lack of data to inform asset behaviour models without expert intervention, meaning that the BAU approach to forecasting faults on the network cannot anticipate impacts of extreme heat leading to gaps in investment planning.

· Applicability of available extreme heat climate data for Alpha prototyping, and UK capability to generate new data for Beta deployment.

· Approach to integrate the CReDo+ tool with CReDo technology, and as a digital resource in the DNO landscape.

· Modelling principles for extreme heat and differences versus prior work on flooding.

· Digital elicitation tool wireframe and requirements for a graphical interface for model building and distributing online questionnaires, informing the project roadmap.

 

Working with stakeholders: To refine our thinking so far, we have engaged with stakeholders from UKPN, Met Office, DEFRA, EA, DfT and Cabinet Office to inform future Phases. We also shared learning with SIF projects WARN, Planning4Resilience, Scenarios for Extreme Events and CommsConnect, identifying complementary or unique points in Alpha and potential collaboration opportunities during Beta. These discussions confirmed CReDo+ uniquely proposes scalable methods to model system-wide impacts of weather events across different sectors. The technology will be interoperable and complementary with asset models proposed by other projects.

Alignment to SIF

CReDo+ seeks SIF funding for CReDo+ because:

· Many digital twin projects related to asset health monitoring such as CReDo require asset failure models. They are heavily reliant on prior asset performance data. For extreme heat use cases, data is limited, hence the approach to develop models drawing on the views and knowledge of experts. The risk of availability and accuracy of data is limiting the ability of infrastructure owners to rely on asset resilience models and SIF funding is essential in overcoming this risk.

· Complementary funding secured from Ofwat Innovation Fund (Catalyst) will develop modes of failure under extreme heat with a focus on the water sector. Together CReDo+ and Catalyst will consider whole system cascading impacts across water and energy sectors advancing CReDo adoption across GB and providing better value for GB customers.

· Current price control mechanisms lack provisions for investing in whole system resilience across utility organisations and infrastructure networks. Innovations are needed to assess and guide the necessary level of system resilience.

 

Challenge 3, focusing on strengthening the UK’s energy system robustness to support efficient roll out of new infrastructure. CReDo+ will develop asset impact models that will provide owners/operators of critical

infrastructure with a system level view of cascading risk. A benefit of this is decision support for intervention for building climate resilience and robustness.

Impacts and Benefits

Maintaining whole system resilience will be more challenging in the future as the current infrastructure was not designed to cope with extreme weather events. The costs of robustness will increase and CReDo+ seeks to minimise those costs.  

 

Frontier Economics (FE) undertook an illustrative CBA during CReDo Phase 1 (2021-22), finding benefits of £81m-£186m for the flooding use case alone. The analysis assumed that the CReDo technology had been scaled up across the entire energy, water and telecoms sectors, which is not yet the case.  CReDo+ seeks to scale CReDo technology with the self-service modelling across the energy sector and to new climate risks. This is needed to realise the estimated FE benefits. CReDo+ also increases beyond FE benefits as extreme heat, flooding and other weather events are additive. The benefits realisation will increase with the increased number of network operators.    Therefore, we estimate that CReDo+ (Extreme Heat scenario) will increase the FE benefits by 50%, in the range of £121.5m-£279m. This is because, outage costs and mitigation strategies of extreme heat and flooding are distinct, but equivalent in impact, and 50% is a conservative estimate.  

 

The full details of the CReDo+ CBA will be understood in Alpha Phase as part of Work Package 7. 

 

Frontier Economics CReDo CBA 

CReDo modelled the cascading impacts of surface water flooding on a combined electricity-water-telecoms network in a region of East Anglia. CReDo outputs costs at the asset and system level including: 

· Private costs through flood repair and guaranteed standard payments

· Direct societal costs of power outages through CIs and CMLs

· Indirect costs of power outages through knock on effects into water and telecoms outages

· Direct costs of water and telecoms outages from flooding

 

The expected benefits of coordinated investment in asset flood defences were simulated up to 2050 and scaled to UK level (Option 1). Relative to the “no investment” baseline, benefits are estimated at £221m (see CBA Option summary). The benefits of DNOs investing in silos were simulated at £77m (Option 2). Further analysis from Frontier Economics, described in PMT Business Case B7, concluded CReDo benefits of £81-186m. The benefits are not solely attributed UKPN, as the project is focused on whole system thinking. 

 

CReDo+ benefit qualification

Financial benefits include reducing the cost of operating the network as asset owners can put preventative measures in place to reduce the likelihood of failures and subsequent repair costs. Therefore, energy networks and other infrastructure asset owners:  

· Can reduce the overall investment cost to deliver a required level of resilience across the whole infrastructure system.  

· Better preparedness and understanding of asset vulnerability will reduce emergency response costs. 

· Cost savings for energy customers due to a lower level of investment and repair cost. The increased risk means a higher level of investment maintaining the current level of resilience.

CReDo+’s guides decision-makers in selecting the investments that will maximise stability at the lowest cost to consumer and with the lowest carbon impact. 

· Reduced CI and CML during extreme weather events, by predicting failures and informing resilience upgrades. Other infrastructure asset owners, as users of network services using power as an input to their service, can minimise their resilience costs by benefiting from energy sector resilience instead of operating backup generators. 

 

New to market – products, processes, and services: UKPN has pioneered confidential asset data sharing with Anglian Water and BT using a data exploration licence. Demonstrating that setting up these agreements with an agreed-upon common objective is possible. Establishing trust across networks is an essential part of this process, and its value needs to be better measured by traditional CBA