Project Summary
CReDo+ will develop the Climate Resilience Demonstrator into the Climate Resilience Decision Optimiser digital twin and data sharing platform, enhancing resilience investment planning and reporting. The project will scale the CReDo technology across the electricity and gas sectors to understand infrastructure interdependencies and cascading risk from extreme weather including flooding, extreme heat, and strong winds. Tools will be developed to encode tacit subject matter expert knowledge into new asset risk models, with a risk modelling framework to cascade asset failures through individual networks, between networks, and across sectors including water and telecoms. This will build whole system climate resilience.
Innovation Justification
Networks and other national infrastructure operators are currently not incentivised to plan beyond their immediate assets. Additionally, current energy network data is often insufficient to provide the cross-network insights that enable cost-effective targeting of resilience budgets or to meet the Regulator’s strategies for whole system planning. CReDo+ addresses Challenge 3, improving the UK’s energy system resilience and robustness by enabling network licensee users to plan for the efficient rollout of new infrastructure in the face of growing risks from a changing climate.
Key innovative aspects include:
First-of-its-kind digital twin providing whole-system view of network connectivity and cascading risks, powered by interoperable technologies and enabled by new data sharing infrastructure;
Integrated economic modelling will overcome the challenges of costing resilience against a range of extreme weather and time horizons, and help realise the direct, indirect, societal, and environmental benefits of adaptation to cascading failure with cost-benefit analysis decision intelligence tools that will be codesigned with planners, asset managers, and engineers;
Connected asset risk modelling encoding tacit knowledge from subject matter experts to understand current and future risks, and Bayesian inference is used to combine and validate with historic fault data;
Risk models will be created using a pioneering Digital Elicitation Tool, with training provided to upskill network experts on use and quantifying risk; and
Interoperable “plug-n-play” capability to integrate existing technologies, such as Predict4Resilience wind risk models.
The CReDo+ Resilience Working Group (RWG) established during Alpha convened energy network organisations to promote, challenge and refine Beta . Working in the open with key stakeholders, we held workshops to share knowledge on their needs and validated the design hypothesis digital twin, modelling and use cases.
Learnings from Alpha, which shaped Beta
User adoption: Mathematical concepts used for asset modelling, decision support, investment planning are complex and not readily understood by target users. Simplifying messaging increases organisational understanding and drives adoption.
Better predictability to resolve data gaps required for assets and systems: Underpinned by a streamlined approach to expert elicitation interviews and data processing. This will enhance the Bayesian network technology underpinning CReDo+.
Stakeholders involvement is key: Leverage the CReDo+ RWG to share lessons learned and identify emerging insights/opportunities between stakeholders.
The current state of the platform is TRL5 IRL 4, and CRL 5, and it is estimated to be at TRL 7-8, IRL 7, and CRL 7 following successful Beta completion. After Beta, some sectors and aspects of climate resilience will be BAU deployed, but further work will be needed to expand to all energy industry and to include full spectrum of climate events which can occur
To ensure the innovation in Beta improves exponentially, stakeholders from within and outside the energy sector continue to be engaged, including Digital Twin developers (via the Digital Twin Hub), government departments and agencies, including DfT, DEFRA, Climate Change Committee, National Infrastructure Commission, Cabinet Office, EA, Ofwat, along with the water and telecoms industry.
Alignment to SIF
Current regulation and price control mechanisms are focused on resilience planning for each sector individually, i.e. lacks the investment provision for organisations to plan beyond their own resilience needs. Thus, there is no incentive to consider cascading risk and whole system resilience across different sectors within BAU activities.
The size and scale of Beta is appropriate to maximise the learnings and address the innovation challenge and theme
Consideration of counterfactual solutions
The counterfactual is the existing state-of-play; the energy sector currently does not plan for whole system resilience, but rather all players use their own tools to plan for their own network resilience. Details of quantified benefits against the counter factual are included in Q6
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 CBA considered three options for energy-water-telecoms climate resilience investment planning solutions relative to counterfactual:
Counterfactual pre-innovation baseline: network operators invest in resilience across their own networks with no consideration for cascading impacts or strong understanding of climate change
Option 1: blanket investment with high budget
Option 2: CReDo+ cross-network digital twin
Option 3: siloed individual-network digital twins
The CBA found that Option 2 could generate significant positive financial returns (£4.4bn NPV at GB level to 2080) on optimising mitigation investments against future extreme weather. CReDo+ reduces technology development costs with a combined solution relative to Option 3 and provides added de-siloing benefits.
Based on asset and cost data provided by networks in the Alpha pilot the following net-benefits scaled to UKPN’s region (based on a flooding and extreme heat use case) have been estimated:
Financial – cost of operating network, cost savings for customers and network users
Direct benefits of £745m to 2080 from:
Reduction in costs of repair and restoration damages due to resilience planning
Capital resilience measures (e.g. structural characteristics, equipment level)
Reduction in cost of temporary operational measures (e.g. backup generators, forced ventilation)
Societal benefits of £887m to 2080 with:
£248m customer benefits through Customer interruptions (CI) and customer minutes lost (CMLs) reductions
£384m water and telecoms interruptions, including those from power outage cascades
£254m direct water and telecoms outages as a result of electricity network failures
Environmental - carbon reduction – direct and indirect CO2 savings per annum
The resilience investments, containment and repair measures available for each asset have associated carbon emissions (e.g. concrete installation, running back-up generators). Although not present in the current prototypes and models, carbon data is something that could be added to CReDo+'s model in future, which would enable views of reductions in emissions for different investment selections.
New to market – products, processes, and services
UKPN pioneered confidential asset data sharing with network partners using a data exploration licence, was first of its kind. It demonstrates execution of such a contract is possible and establishing trust across networks is essential.
Others not specific to SIF
Costs generated by failure of wastewater assets in the Anglian Water network (£15.9m reduction versus counterfactual), considering:
Pollution incidents and compliance failures by Wastewater Treatment Facilities
Sewage pumping station failures cause sewage overflows (internal and external).
Other non-quantified benefits address big-picture goals like economic prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental sustainability.
Societal welfare: an overall improvement in infrastructure resilience and service delivery contributes to enhanced societal well-being. Schools can remain open while essential services such as water supply and sanitation remain operational, safeguarding public health.
Enhanced decision-making: CReDo+ aids decision-makers in making better, faster decisions, improving risk anticipation and mitigation, efficient resource allocation, and identifying opportunities for robust long-term strategies.
Climate change resilience: Improving sector resilience by mitigating the risks of extreme weather events and fostering widespread innovation in green technologies.
Energy sector stability: Reducing downtime risks and minimising costs, enhancing confidence among stakeholders.
Public health and safety: Identifying assets at high risk of cascading failure so that decision-makers can ensure that hospitals and emergency services can provide continuity of care during extreme weather events, reducing the risk of adverse health outcomes for vulnerable populations. Similarly, enhanced safety protocols and communication systems for field workers can improve their ability to respond effectively to emergencies, minimising the risk of injuries.
Further benefits include better reporting through Adaptation Reporting Power (ARP) and other resilience reporting to Ofgem, DEFRA, and other agencies, potentially attracting additional resilience investments.
