Amount awarded: £913,029
Led by: Anglian Water
Partners: Connected Places Catapult (CPC), Computational Modelling Cambridge Limited (CMCL), UK Research and Innovation – Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), United Utilities Group Plc, Affinity Water Limited, UK Power Networks (Operations) Limited
Project completed: June 2024
See project updates on the Anglian Water website
The water sector is currently unsure of the impact of extreme heat events on asset failure. These events are happening now, as evidenced by the UK seeing temperatures of over 40°C in the summer of 2022, and these extreme heat events are expected to increase in frequency and duration in the coming years. The goal of the CReDo Extreme Heat Project was to improve the water sector’s understanding of the impact of extreme heat on assets through the development of:
The probabilistic asset failure models are run through the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) digital twin, which provides a visual representation of how utility infrastructure could react in these events, supporting resilience planning and identifying key investment in assets which will strengthen water companies and community resilience in a changing climate. This project has leveraged CReDo’s expert elicitation methodology and probabilistic asset modelling to produce the Asset Risk Tool, an early phase prototype to help the water industry better understand the probable impacts of extreme heat on assets. Through incorporation with CReDo, the outputs of this project will improve the water sector’s understanding of the impact of extreme heat on assets. It will lead to more informed decision making on strategic cross-sector investment to ensure water supply and sewerage services remain resilient in the face of a changing climate.
Challenge Overview – Extreme Heat and the Water Sector
The UK water sector is only beginning to understand the effect of extreme heat on asset failure. On top of this, the failure cascade of critical connected utility infrastructure is even more unknown. The Climate Change Committee reported that “[The] connectedness of infrastructure systems means that climate and weather-related impacts in one system can cause large and cascading failures in connected systems” and “many organisations are struggling to fully assess risks from infrastructure interdependencies.” This lack of understanding is primarily due to temperatures of over 40˚C, as seen in summer 2022, having never previously been experienced in the UK. During this event, a significant number of water assets were impacted due to heat or required emergency cooling actions to maintain normal operation. These unforeseen scenarios resulted in an overall additional cost to Anglian Water customers valued at £2.9m. Impacts included additional energy costs associated with keeping water assets cool enough to operate at normal levels. By 2070, summer temperature increases of up to 6.8˚C are expected in the UK alongside an increased frequency of prolonged extreme heat events. Without a clearer understanding of how extreme heat events affect water company assets and critical utility infrastructure, communities will face increasing impacts. Improved resilience planning across systems and sectors is also necessary to mitigate these effects.
Probabilistic Asset Failure Models and Expert Elicitation
A major challenge in understanding extreme heat scenarios in the water sector is the lack of a comprehensive risk assessment, which has led to inadequate planning and preparedness. While historical asset failure data can aid in understanding these risks, it alone does not solve the problem. This gap has resulted in unforeseen negative impacts on communities and businesses. This CReDo Ofwat Catalyst project has aimed to address this lack of historical data through the process of expert elicitation. Expert elicitation is a methodology which involves extracting operational knowledge from expert engineers. The knowledge is digitised and translated into a format which is usable by CReDo technologies, including the CReDo digital twin and the CReDo Asset Risk Tool. The digitised knowledge can then be used by these applications to provide insights on the probability of asset failure in an extreme heat scenario.
The steps to build probabilistic asset failure models using expert elicitation include:
This enables data scientists to build a Bayesian Network structure which captures key variables describing the behaviour of vulnerable assets. By doing this, the chain of events leading to impacts, such as supply interruptions, are uncovered and understood.
The data scientists then create hypothetical climate scenarios and a questionnaire to produce probabilities for the various events leading to asset failure.
Asset experts then respond to the climate scenario questionnaire. Their responses allow the data scientists to determine the probability of failure for each element within the asset model. This is known as probability elicitation.
Finally, data scientists process of all information collected in this process to generate a final working model which represents the likelihood of asset failure due to an extreme climate scenario.
CReDo Asset Risk Tool
To improve understanding of the impact of extreme heat on assets, the project has leveraged CReDo’s expert elicitation methodology and probabilistic asset modelling to produce the CReDo Asset Risk Tool. The Tool enables users to investigate the potential effects of different weather events on water assets. The Tool will show the probable impact of a selection of maximum forecasted temperatures (i.e. 30-35 °C, 35-40 °C and 40-45 °C) for a selected duration of time (1, 3, 7 and 14 days in a row) on a user-defined collection of assets. Once the user selects the weather scenario for analysis, the CReDo Asset Risk Tool will provide an estimation (as % chance) of:
Who can benefit from using the CReDo Asset Risk Tool?
The Tool can be used to understand asset resilience and vulnerabilities to extreme heat scenarios throughout the planning cycle. This will help with prioritisation of organisational investment and decision making, and support resilience reporting.
The Tool can support emergency and foresight planning. It can provide users with a better understanding of risk to assets and vulnerabilities in the instance of extreme heat scenarios such as a heat wave.
The Tool can be used to support and inform the design of water assets. It can support resilience assessments required during the design phase and help the design team to design and deliver assets that are more resilient to extreme heat scenarios.
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For more information on Climate Resilience Demonstrator – Extreme Heat Scenario, take a look at the following resources:
