The Impact of Climate Change (IPCC) on the UK Energy Industry, is a year long research project sponsored by the majority of the UK energy Utilities and facilitated by the Met Office.

Climate change and the impact on our environment is a major issue facing the world today. The latest findings from latest research confirm that global mean temperature continues to rise and almost certainly attributable to mans activities in burning fossil fuels. Regional changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, wind and wave activity, and floods and storms have the potential to profoundly affect society.

The project aims to provide practical guidance on the application of climate change scenarios to energy industry processes. It will look to make recommendations to the participating companies on how best to asses the impacts of climate change on the planning and operation of the supply industry.

It will investigate the need for transmission and distribution systems to adopt new standards. How will climate change affect the risk of infrastructure damage; and, will the rating of lines, cables and transformers be affected? The networks proportion of the project was funded through the Innovation Funding Incentive, as is covered in this summary report.

Objectives

The electricity infrastructure being installed today has as design life of c.40years, meaning that most of the network assets installed in 2005-2010 will still be in place in 2050. Changes in global climate are expected to occur over this timeframe, which are likely to have a direct impact on the operating conditions of the electricity network.

• Understand the potential impact of climate change to network assets will ensure the network built today is fit for purpose into the future

• Create methodology for prediction of gas and electricity demand using climate models (dealing with limitations in spatial and temporal resolution)

• Assess the importance of temporal resolution to the calculation of energy demand

• Investigate the differences of modelling demand using: climate model output, new climate model diagnostics, and weather generated output.