Project Summary
Physical climate risks will affect existing infrastructure in the next decades. The nature and scale of risks will become more uncertain over longer time scales.
WELLNESS sets out to provide core evidence and a coherent approach to resilience standards, assessment, and quantitative metrics that can inform the decision-making process of electricity network stakeholders. The intent is to fairly and transparently to value the resilience contribution from different resources with a multi-energy background on a level playing field. This therefore can provide means and tools for network owners and operators to justify their resilience-orientated investments in front of the regulator.
Innovation Justification
This is a continuation from the Discovery Phase where the WELLNESS team pursued researching opportunities to develop a consistent and standardised approach to embed resilience in network decision making to support the GB's net-zero carbon future whilst tackling the impact of emerging physical climate risks (e.g., floods, windstorms, and heatwaves) on the critical national infrastructure, i.e. the long-lived and rapidly changing energy infrastructure.
This project addresses the "Improving energy system resilience and robustness" challenge theme by directly providing a methodology that will enable resilience to be embedded into network decision making in a fair and standardised way across transmission and distribution networks. Such a framework does not currently exist as recognised by National Infrastructure Commission, and the industry is falling behind the recommended timelines. WELLNESS aims to bridge this gap as a matter of urgency. The project's core objective is to incorporate resilience and robustness as key and measurable considerations into system design (subsequently influencing investments) and to provide innovative open-source tools.
Previous work on resilience has typically focussed on individual aspects to create tools for specific tasks, for example quantifying resilience of networks to flooding events. There is, however, a significant innovation gap with respect to a holistic approach which can be applied to assess network and energy system resilience across different networks, exposed to different physical climate risks. This approach should provide decision making tools which are comparable and enable fair investment decisions. For example, currently there is not a standardised assessment to value the resilience contribution from different interventions such as flood defence systems for distribution substations, or rapid overhead line restoration technologies in the wake of windstorms. Let alone, whether advanced technologies and use of flexible resources can provide a more effective mitigation of resilience risks. Delivering this type of innovation requires coordination across the networks (NGET and ENWL), as well as with experts in resilience (provided in this project by the universities and ARUP). This project has been challenged and refined by internal and external stakeholders as well as building upon learnings and findings from previous projects to make sure that it is fit for purpose.
It is, however, very challenging and carries risk -- which is why SIF funding is sought. At present, networks are making resilience-based investments and this will continue under business-as-usual activities (as was noted during Discovery submission feedback). What this project offers is the potential to coordinate this to a much greater extent across networks by introducing a standardised approach for aiding resilience investments as well as focusing on how emerging physical climate risks affect long-lived infrastructure (which may not be design to these risks). It will also enable resilience-based decisions to become part of the justification for wider network investments, linking in directly with decarbonisation and flexibility investments instead of remaining separate and detached as standalone processes. A coordinated approach will result in a more efficient and cost-effective investments for customers. The level of coordination required, pushing the state-of-the art in this area, and the risk associated with the underlying complexity are a strong justification for SIF funding.
This project will deliver the state-of-the-art in this area (more information can be found in the appendix). Resilience quantification and assessment exists, but it has never been combined in this way into form a standardised approach for the industry. Furthermore, it will advance the individual aspects which come together to build the framework advancing the physical climate risks modelling, the asset fragility assessment, the cascading failure simulators, the decision making tools and developing a single open-source prototype platform to bring these together into one tool for the first time
Impacts and Benefits
Financial -future reductions in the cost of operating the electricity transmission and distribution networks, leading to a reduction in costs to consumers of energy and network services.
By embedding resilience in network decision making, alongside other drivers of net zero and reliability, investments required to meet current net-zero targets can be strategically selected to also improve whole system resilience. As a direct result, the cost of reactive resilience investments reduces, for example deployment of mobile generation, flood defences, construction of assets -leading to an overall reduction in cost to consumer.
Various new to market benefits associated with the investment in, and use of new products, processes and services.
By way of example, increasing network capacity through investment in, and use of novel conductors, cross arms and associated equipment from the start of the next price control where the metrics would include percentage of capacity increased against cost to build new circuits. During the course of this project, a range of appropriate and realistic new products, processes and services will be identified and built into the assessment.
Environmental - carbon reduction - direct CO2 savings per annum against a business-as-usual counterfactual.
This will be based on historical data or industry baselines from the start of the next price control. For example, emissions relating to backup diesel generators. Scope 2 emissions savings will also be factored into the whole energy system assessment. During this project, a range of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission reductions will be identified and factored into the assessment and its outputs.
