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UTILITY WEEK | 8TH - 14TH MAY 2015 | 15 Utility Week Live: review I t is clear that our outdated electricity sys- tem is ill-equipped to deal with the current rate of change. By imposing a great many rapid changes on to a slow-moving and fragmented electricity system, like an over- worked donkey the network will undoubt- edly collapse, causing extensive power outages and blackouts. As Mott MacDonald's group strategic development manager Simon Harrison warned, this is "the sort of thing that brings governments down". At the heart of the problem is the dispar- ity between different paces of change. The speed of the power industry is slow and the speed at which people develop is much faster. The speed of technology is, however, a whole order of magnitude faster still. Facing up to the increasing complexity of decarbonisation will mean greater collabora- tion and a drive toward "whole-system inte- gration", as John Scott, director of Chiltern Power explained. The general consensus in the energy industry is that the new "smart world" needs modelling techniques that are not currently in place. Simon Harrison, chair of Institu- tion of Engineering and Technology's Energy Policy Panel, advised industry and govern- ment to build new ways of modelling the "phenomena that are going to emerge in this changed world" in order to ensure that different elements of the energy system are "seamlessly interoperable and secure". As for gas, Utility Week Live delegates firmly believed that gas will be around for many years yet and will play an important role in decarbonisation – despite its net- works being viewed as the poor. That said, the just as electricity genera- tion will diversify with decarbonisation, so it is expected that gas technology will expand. At the moment a great deal of renewable gas in the UK is used to generate electricity through combined heat and power. National Grid's gas distribution network strategy director David Parkin advocated a more effi- cient use of the resource: injecting biogas straight into the network and then using it in condensing boilers in people's homes. LV Extreme weather events How well can you prepare to respond to the unpredictable? What we learnt about: cutting carbon T he devastating impact of the Christmas 2013 storms is still fresh in the minds of those utilities which fought hard to restore power and water supply amid intensely hostile conditions, matched only by the political backlash that followed. A roundtable discussion on managing severe weather events identified three key considerations for UK utilities to avoid dam- age to both assets and reputation. Understand long-term forecasting Event sponsor the Met Office made no bones about saying that climate change is an observable trend that will increase the fre- quency of severe weather events. However, while its forecasting tools improve every year, risk remains in predict- ing the likely impact a weather event might have. For example, weather that is less "severe" could result in consequences just as devastating as historically severe conditions if it is followed in close succession by storms of a similar scale. A cumulative effect could also be felt if the weather events occur in close geographic succession, which could have particular implications for external utilities contrac- tors working within a specific region, which may find its resources stretched. Taken to an extreme, a utility could face real weather- related problems even without extraordinary weather. Aer all, a drought is just a very long period of ordinary days with no rain, the Met Office noted. For historic weather events the Met Office is able to give advanced warning which, at Roundtable sponsor between two and five days out is very accu- rate, but utilities need to have action plans in place long before then. Think long term The five to eight-year regulatory periods enforcing innovation can cause water and network companies to take a shorter-term approach than is desirable to develop an adaption plan of long-term trends like cli- mate change, it was agreed. In addition, trends in population distri- bution and housing development (oen in flood plains) also generally occur at broader timescales than the regulatory periods. Prepare for multi-impact threats A severe storm would have big implications not only for networks and water companies, but also for road, rail and emergency ser- vices and include the need for reaction from the Environment Agency and local councils. At present, plans for adaption to climate change are "siloed" to each service provider. The roundtable agreed that perhaps the biggest problem is a "head in the sand" atti- tude to the worst case scenarios. Customers are unlikely to be sympathetic to compa- nies that fail to anticipate severe weather, they agreed. And they are unlikely to accept excuses about the unforeseeable nature of specific events. JA