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20 | 20TH - 26TH MARCH 2015 | UTILITY WEEK Resilience is about under- standing how your assets and infrastructure will respond to weather. This doesn't have to mean extremes of weather. Continuous rain through 30, 60 or 90 days, for example, might cause your business to breach a threshold where operations and financial performance are impacted. To be able to determine where those thresholds or tolerance levels are for different kinds of weather, the Met Office has been working to develop modelling tools that quantify the impact of weather events or sce- narios. To do this we go through a modelling process which matches weather data against a range of organisational data – like asset data and call centre data. We can then use analytics to identify weather signals for certain kinds of organisational responses. It's important utilities think about their resilience in this light because they can- not separate their operational or financial performance from weather, climate, or swings be- tween different weather events. The fundamentally important thing for a successful weather modelling process is quality data. We've been working with utilities in this area for around two years now and so far we've seen a very mixed quality. If you have bad quality data, without the right metadata you are not going to get the right informa- tion out of the modelling. The introduction of smart metering should improve both the quality and detail of data available across the utilities industry and open up a lot of opportunities for improved resilience. It will help us under- stand much more clearly how to respond in different situations and for different requirements. If we're aiming for better resilience from weather data, as important as quality data is an organisation's approach to integrating weather modelling information into their risk-based decision-making processes. The information the Met Office can provide can be used for a variety of different purposes. You can use it as a forecasting tool to understand when a certain outcome or impact will occur for a certain asset – we've being offering this kind of product to the aviation industry for a while. You can also use the model- ling information for planning purposes, to see how your assets will respond to 'what if ' sce- narios like long periods of rain or dry weather. And you can use the information for more basic operational purposes, under- standing how to best service your assets in different scenarios for the long term. But for all these uses and more, there needs to be an understanding and a will to incorporate the information into immediate and long-term decision-making frameworks. In isolation, the information doesn't have much value. We've been working in ear- nest with utilities over the past two years to help them improve their resilience and get value out Caroline Acton "The urgency with which vulnerabilities need to be addressed depends on their importance to each utility company." of the analytics expertise the Met Office has. We've been working with the power sector, for exam- ple, to interpret the impacts of the stormy weather experienced in the winter of 2013/14. We're also working with industry to understand how weather infor- mation can help in balancing the increasing contribution of renewable generation and in demand management. Our work with the water industry on resilience will only become more important as we look to the future. We see that as extreme weather events become more common, companies need to understand where the vulnerabilities are in their networks. The urgency with which these vulnerabilities need to be ad- dressed depends on their impor- tance to each utility company. That importance is likely to be driven by the regulator or cus- tomers and SIM scores. A com- pany's approach to resilience is linked to a lot of factors. As utilities approach a period of significant infrastructure replacement, there's a real op- portunity to improve resilience. The more they replace ageing infrastructure with smarter technologies, the adoption of the internet of things and intel- ligent assets, the more opportu- nity they have to increase their resilience because they will have access to so much more detailed data. UtilityWeekLive www.utilityweek-keynote.com NEC, 21-23 April 2015 What I know about resilience… Resilience is on the agenda at the Utility Week Live keynote conference, the premier gath- ering for senior electricity, gas and water executives. Sitting alongside the free content on the exhibition floor at Utility Week Live, this exclusive VIP conference gives delegates the opportunity to review and discuss lessons learned from other sectors. UtilityWeek S P E C I A L R E P O RT: PA RT 3 / M A RC H 2 0 1 5 Resilience " " Caroline Acton, head of utili- ties, Met Office, is speaking at: www.utilityweek-keynote.com