Working with National Grid to proactively mitigate flood impacts for Britain's electricity assets

Challenge

While National Grid's infrastructure is engineered to be resilient in all conditions, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means measures need to be in place to make sure its network and processes remain robust into the future. Currently, the network's control room continually monitors weather events and aims to manage and respond to environmental risks as optimally as possible, but it has identified ways to improve its capabilities and more effectively mitigate any impact on asset operability.

Solution

National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET), Frazer-Nash Consultancy, Previsico, and the University of Liverpool (UoL) are working together, supported by the EIC, to improve the management of environmental risks to electricity assets.

The project is looking to develop a platform for more efficiently monitoring and predicting risks to National Grid assets. The current method involves continual monitoring of extreme weather events to determine the category of risk and mitigations needed. The new system is hoping to create an automated approach for a warning system considering weather and flood risk.

Within this project, Previsico will utilise sensor data, forecasting and nowcasting to forecast flood risk at NGET asset locations. This will include installing proprietary sensor hardware and forecasting technology on live NGET assets to provide real-world flood risk data. The system will provide rainfall predictions and live hydrodynamic modelling to produce hyperlocal flood forecasts.

Impact

Previsico's Early Flood Warning Service provides timely information on surface water flood risk to inform event response, therefore mitigating impacts and losses.

Our data insights can support actioning of requests for help from customers during and/or after events (front-end triage).

Our sensor solutions support accurate and effective monitoring of water levels and conveyance (above and below ground) across significant geographical scales in near-real-time to inform understanding of risks to networks and infrastructure.

"Collaborations such as these are helping us unlock the new capabilities we will need to manage our assets in the face of the increasing impacts of climate change. The project will harness the data available to us more effectively to ensure our network infrastructure remains resilient against extreme weather events in the future."

Nicola Todd, Head of Strategy and Innovation, National Grid Electricity Transmission