Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 27TH SEPTEMBER - 3RD OCTOBER 2019 | 25 Operations & Assets Day 1 highlights • Climate crisis and utility strategy: Chief executive debate. • A live interview with chief regulators. • Disruptor showcase: Octo- pus Energy's Greg Jackson on the challenger brand's acquisitions and growth ambitions. • Technology for tomorrow's utilities: tech leaders' debate. Day 2 highlights • Building and maintaining resilience: Strategy and infrastructure experts will look at climate change challenges, preparing for evolving cyber threats, and planning for uncertain future needs and demands. • Finance and investment: Looking at the sector from the investor's point of view in an uncertain climate, green … nance, and cross-utility investment. Speakers include Jenny Pyper, chief executive, Utility Regulator, with a CFO/FD discussion on the risks from the resurgent volatility of currency markets. • Releasing a whole system view: With speakers and panel debate focusing on working with other organisations to improve the end service, including in the vulnerability space. • Breakouts: Separate sessions will look at smart customer service and operating smart assets. For full details of the Congress, visit: event.utilityweek.co.uk/ congress/ Congress 2019 will be asking just how sus- tainable this is. We'll be hearing from industry experts, those building, running and maintaining our critical infrastructure, and asking what the key resilience challenges are and how we can truly stress-test our response going forward. We'll also be asking how utilities should be both preparing to meet these huge chal- lenges for the sector, and ensuring they fully seize the many future opportunities ahead. Technology It's a complicated, moving picture, with technology increasingly playing a major role in that future via the smart revolution that is seeing customers expect the same ser- vice levels from utilities as they receive from exemplar, global players. Yet the more sophisticated and e– cient, our utilities infrastructure becomes, the more vulnerable it is and, if disrupted, the greater impact such disruption has on peo- ple's lives. Congress will also be asking how we plug the resilience gaps, as relationships between the sector and technology become ever closer. We'll also be looking at how we man- age consumer expectations in the future. Finance and investment Key to the resilience vision will be securing su– cient investment. Day two will be hearing from … nance experts, from inside the industry. We'll be discussing how more investment will be key to future plans, how utilities are shaping up from an investor's perspective, and how we can keep investment ˜ owing into the sector at a time of ongoing regulatory, domestic and international political uncertainty. Collaboration Congress will be rounding up by hearing how collaboration will prove vital in the months and years ahead if we are meet the nation's infrastructure needs. Joint working and corporate planning, joined-up thinking on regulation and policy – including about those in the vulnerabil- ity space – will be imperative in the new, more interdependent utility landscape of the future. What more should government and utilities be doing to engen- der this new, collegiate approach and to ensure we are prepared for future shocks, change and dis- ruption? Can we really be stronger together and what needs to happen next? Join us at Utility Week Congress to … nd out more. Heavy rainfall threatened the collapse of Toddbrook Reservoir in Whaley Bridge in August. More than 1,500 residents had to be evacuated until water levels subsided and RAF Chinook helicopters were called in to drop tonnes of rubble into the gap in an effort to shore up the dam. Utility Congress 2019 is sponsored by This August saw the biggest blackout in the UK in decades

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