National Grid has undertaken two projects on researching the risks of flooding at substations in order to ensure economic investment takes place to protect these substations.

Objectives

The first of these projects has been initiated to:

• Research the level of current and projected risk to substations posed by flooding and a comparison of these risks with the levels of security provided under The Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 (ESQCR)

• To develop Generic solutions and indicative costs to mitigate the risk of flooding should be identified. These may be permanent or temporary and appropriate for new substations or retrofitting to existing substations. It is envisaged that solutions may be site specific, or involve wider flood protection provided by the Environment Agency.

The second scheme will engage Mott MacDonald to carry out a desktop flood assessment of sites identified as being at Significant and Moderate risk of flooding to establish what projected depth of water can be expected from 1:100, 1:200 and 1:1000 flood events. This data will be used to determine what defence strategy can best be employed at each site:

• With sufficient warning the use of mobile flood defences (Geo Design flood barrier system)

• Investment to remove the risk (where the risk and consequence is deemed unacceptable)

• Where projected depths are shallow determining if site is actually at risk

• Identify areas of sites which may flood and relate this to vulnerable plant items.