Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/819678
NETWORK / 11 / MAY 2017 W hat connects information, com- munications and technology (ICT), transport, heat and cooling, health- care, the built environment, indus- try, retail, residential and commer- cial activity? The answer is energy. To be more speci• c: energy is the underlying driver of economic and societal wellbeing. This profound fact is taken for granted by many participants in the delivery of these di• erent activities, and yet the removal of this basic "right" is likely to lead to near total breakdown of our soci- ety. Nowhere was this better exempli• ed for me than the Cumbria ‚ ooding of 2016. Electricity was turned o• to protect the safety and security of the system and plunged 60,000 inhabitants into the dark ages for three days. An excellent report of the incident and its repercussions is available on the Royal Academy of Engineering's website (www.raeng.org.uk). It demon- strated just how much we rely on energy to provide the very fabric of modern life and how telecommunications are essential for living our lives now. The withdrawal of this given – delivery of energy to live your life as you wish– was a shock to many and a wake-up call for government, which realised how close we are to civil unrest and chaos once this essential service is removed. Within hours of the electricity go- ing o• , mobile phone coverage was lost in the a• ected area, shops were unable to supply goods because of the inability of their electronic cash machines and stock control mechanisms to operate. Emergency backup plans could not be implemented because of the condi- tions. The local A&E was overwhelmed by students from Lancaster university trying to • nd power to charge their mobile phones. The point of recounting this story is to highlight the absolute interconnectivity of the infrastructure we now have. All the di• erent aspects of life mentioned here are underpinned by the timely, reliable and resilient delivery of energy through our complex power infrastructure. This incident exempli• ed the need for whole-system thinking, it highlighted the need for local as well as national resilience, and the fact that this is a real-life challenge – not a hypothetical one. As we move to more distributed generation, local intelligence and communi- ties providing their own support structures, there is a groundswell of grid-edge activity that has never been seen before. The question is: how do we empower local communities while ensuring the reliability, resilience and integrity of a local and national system? Think what will happen when we embrace the Internet of Things and the interconnected 25 to 50 bil- lion devices that are forecast to appear on the system over the next 30 years. This complexity starts to become challenging for policymakers. Traditionally they have distributed the problems among di• erent departments – health, transport, energy. So they may • nd this hypo- thetical use case very challenging: I'm travelling in my driverless car across the Peak District (a rural location). I have a heart condition and wear a remotely monitored and controlled pacemaker. My car is about to encounter a possible crash. I am driving past a primary substation that is to one side of the road and on the other is a railway track with a high-speed train just moving o• from a red signal – the 300 occupants are streaming videos and the train asset system is being monitored. The substation has just detected a high-voltage fault. Every one of these connected devices is using the newly rolled out 5G com- munications network. Who gets priority on the network – net neutrality does not allow for prioritisation – the car crash, the pacemaker, the substation with a fault, the train…? This is a scenario that I posed to the European Commission 5G IoT Summit in Brussels. I was wearing my European Utility Telecoms Council director hat. It was attended by many experts in the • eld. The room was a little silent. The hypothetical scenario I describe is not that far away from becoming reality. The challenge of complex, critical systems is that we have not got the cross-cutting skills in suž cient quantity to deal with the challenges we are heading for. The old process of reducing the problem until it was one that could be understood by one silo and then another is no longer viable. Whole system design, build, implementation, test and mainte- nance are di• erent skills from those of our traditional skill and competency pro• les. As the energy sector chair for the Institution of Engi- neering and Technology, I see the need for much greater collaboration between sectors and disciplines, especial- ly in the cross-fertilisation of skills and competencies. Consider your own organisation. Are you ready for the whole-system challenge? "The government realised how close we are to civil unrest." G E T R E A DY FO R T H E W H O L E SY S T E M C H A L L E N G E DUNCAN BOTTING MANAGING DIRECTOR GLOBAL SMART TRANSFORMATION