The expanding and interconnected electricity network poses challenges for National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) in monitoring and assessing network resilience. Currently, tracking resilience involves multiple metrics on separate Power BI pages, making it difficult to view overall resilience and hindering timely decision-making during storms or major events. This fragmented approach can lead to suboptimal maintenance and repair decisions. To address these challenges, the proposed project aims to incorporates probabilistic risk analysis to further improve resilience assessments, enhance decision-making accuracy using risk scores, and identify weak areas in the network. Additionally, simplify monitoring through a holistic map view. Ultimately, the project seeks to improve network resilience by streamlining risk identification and establishing minimum resilience levels for substations. FRAME II will be the full product release following the Minimum Viable Project phase in FRAME I.
Benefits
- Tool will highlight and quantify risk at network/site/asset level and provide enhanced justification for replacement, fix, reinforcement, new operating regime etc. The tool will show this in a way that is digestible for a person and help prioritise. This justifyies the reason to fix assets and ensures we are more intelligent about where we deploy defect repairs.
- Improving defect repairs improves network resilience and reduces constraints.
- Consolidates all topics onto one single page with a unified map view, improving trend identification across the whole network i.e., more than 350 sites with various asset types.
- Implementation of a scoring system for each issue will enable site resilience scoring, prioritising repairs and identifying high-risk locations for enhanced network resilience at a lower cost.
- Facilitates faster decision-making during network events and extreme weather conditions.
- Enables more accurate decision-making by utilizing holistic resilience information. Supports improved investment justification and asset management decisions.
- Enhances overall network resilience by identifying weak areas and establishing minimum resilience levels for substations.
- Centralising assets, manufacturers, technical limitations (TLs), and compliance information streamlines identification of recurring issues, justifying investment in critical assets in high-risk or neglected areas.
Learnings
Outcomes
FRAME I provides NGET with a scalable and transparent foundation for risk-informed decision-making. It enhances business ability to anticipate and mitigate asset failures, complements existing frameworks like and supports the transition toward a more adaptive, intelligence-led asset management strategy.
Recommendations for further work
It is recommended to set up a follow up project (FRAME II) to develop a web application displaying key metrics for the Network Resilience Risk Tool based on the work of FRAME I. FRAME II should focus on the following activities:
- Enhancing the modelling methodology by refining the current approach.
- Investigating additional features to improve technical limitation prediction accuracy and identifying new datasets for potential inclusion.
- Adding consequence of failure as a quantifiable metric, to be used in conjunction with technical limitation predictions.
Lessons Learnt
None to report at this stage.
Dissemination
There is a plan to collaboratively share the key outcomes and lessons learned across the wider industry. A dissemination workshop and conference presentation are expected in early 2026.
