Utility Week

40 | JANUARY 2023 | UTILITY WEEK Networks Roundtable Resilience: The bogeyman Urgently needed interventions for long-term energy resilience are being hobbled by investment disincentives and strategic ambiguity. This was the message from energy network leaders at a recent closed-doors debate. I nvestment in resilience has become "a bogeyman" in the energy networks indus- try. This was the view expressed by one senior power sector veteran at a recent Util- ity Week roundtable, held in association with S&C Electric Company. The event, which explored the increas- ing vulnerability of the energy system to the impacts of climate change, as well as other threats to resilience, stirred strong feelings among the assembled industry leaders. As the debate spanned issues from regulatory incentives and strategic frameworks to tac- tical points on tree felling and mutual aid agreements, opinions forged and hardened at the sharp end of network operations were plainly expressed. Pressing home their views on the dispar- agement of resilience investment in recent years, our power sector leader condemned what they termed the "fashion following" tendencies of companies and Ofgem. "What- ever 'next big thing' is coming down the road we get hooked on it and seem to feel the need to create a bogeyman [to „ ght against]… for the last few years, because we've wanted to see more [energy] ‡ exibility and move to DSOs [distribution system operators], we've made reinforcement 'bad'. "But we need reinforcement for resilience and reinforcement is perfectly natural for any community where you know the demand is going to be there forever – or for the life- time of the next set of assets." These comments elicited nods of agree- ment from the assembled group of network experts – including from a former regulator who added that an "e‹ ciency mindset" in regulation and pursuit of "just in time" oper- ations as an ideal, is "no longer „ t for pur- pose". "All of that runs counter to the idea of allowing for redundancy, which you need for resilience," they said. Change urgently needed Finding a better way forward is a matter of urgency. Evidence that climate change is driving increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events is mounting. In 2021/22 six named storms ravaged the UK, including Storm Arwen, which resulted in the loss of power for more than 1 million customers. A small but signi„ cant minority of customers were le˜ without power for as long as 13šdays. And it's not just storms causing prob- lems. The summer of 2022 saw temperatures hit record highs across the UK – exceeding 40C in some locations. The unprecedented nature of this heat caused real problems for a number of networks, with fault volumes spiking on underground assets and the capacity of transmission lines reduced due to swellingšcables. Furthermore, climate change poses com- plex resilience challenges far beyond the impacts of extreme weather. As the UK seeks to decarbonise, converging reliance of the power system to support electric vehicle (EV) charging, electri„ ed heat and new forms of energy production – such as the manufac- ture of green hydrogen – presents another front on which network operators must „ ght to maintain reliable and secure supplies. So, notwithstanding perceived disin- centives in the regulatory framework for investing in resilience, how should net- works respond to mitigate these interlinking threats to the reliability, safety and security of supplies? What is resilience? The answer is frustratingly unclear, accord- ing to our debate participants. Perhaps most strikingly, this is because there is no consen- sus around what we collectively mean by "resilience". There is no common measure for appraising how resilient today's energy system is or how resilient we might need or want it to be in the future. Without this common understanding, it is very di‹ cult to mount sophisticated strategies for resil- ience that extend beyond short-term tactical actions, said our industry leaders. "Part of the solution must be to have some kind of agreed de„ nition of resilience that can be used to shape network design stand- ards," commented one participant. Another senior engineering director with experience in both power transmission and distribution agreed that a better set of resilience metrics would help the regulator determine "what is poor performance from a network versus an indication that there is a genuine need for resilience investment". Developing this idea, a former networks regulator recognised the existence of Net- work Asset Resilience Measures (NARMS), but said these have some signi„ cant limita- tions. "They are really just about the condi- tion of the asset," they said. "Not about its resilience in a meaningful sense." "There is de„ nitely a call for some new thinking here," continued our regulatory expert. "It probably needs to be at gov- ernment level and indeed the National Infrastructure Commission has called for guidance from government on resilience standards." But industry is not simply leaving the creation of new resilience standards and measures to government. A number of debate participants made it clear they are on the front foot in this space, collaborat- ing with academia and infrastructure own- ers in other geographies to come up with useful ways of quantifying resilience, both to speci„ c threats and in a broader "hazard agnostic"šsense. Useful reference cases were mentioned with regards to utilities in Illinois and Flor- ida in the US, and the approach of the New Zealand regulator to monitoring responses to "exceptional events" was also commended. In short, said one former networks regulator at the table, "we can see that a lot of juris- dictions are trying to „ nd a way of measuring resilience better. But no one's cracked it yet." One of the major stumbling blocks for international e§ orts to establish better resil- ience measures, according to one expert at our event, is that the challenges of climate change and decarbonisation require a shi˜ away from a traditional focus on resilience of infrastructure and assets and a better appreciation of what constitutes "community resilience".

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