New Utility Provider Partnership To Support Resilient Infrastructure

A new collaboration between Anglian Water, UK Power Networks and BT has been announced, with the partnership working together on a Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo), with the aim being to develop a more resilient built environment in order to protect the UK in the face of flooding and extreme weather events.

Due to be previewed at COP26 in Glasgow this November, CReDo will – in a UK first – develop a digital twin across energy, water and telecoms networks, providing a practical example of how climate adaptation and resilience can be improved by connected data.

The project will be looking specifically at the impact of flooding as a result of climate change on energy, water and telecoms networks, demonstrating how operators can use secure information sharing to plan for and mitigate the risks of flooding on network performance, ensuring reliable service delivery to customers.

David Riley, head of carbon neutrality for Anglian Water, explained that the real-life benefits of using digital twin technology are already being seen, showing how the firm can “plan, construct and maintain our assets as a water company, while ensuring we remain on track to reach our net zero target by 2030”.

He went on to say: “Using the same innovation to look into the future and securely share data to plan climate change resilience across utility networks is incredibly powerful, vital, in fact, if we are to maintain service to our customers despite the extreme challenges we all face.”

CReDO will make use of an information management framework approach to enable those in the partnership to share data across a secure platform. It will demonstrate the capability of this approach to connect digital twins in a scalable way to inform decision-making in capital and operational planning.

This will drive down the cost and disruptive impact of extreme weather events, as well as increasing resilience. The project will also demonstrate the potential of a national digital twin in the delivery of beneficial outcomes for the planet and its people.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a system or object over the course of its lifecycle, updated using real-time data and using machine learning and reasoning, and simulation to help inform decision-making.

The object or system being studied is outfitted with sensors related to different areas of functionality, which then produce data about performance, such as weather conditions, temperature, energy output and so on. This information is then relayed to a processing system and applied to the digital twin.

Once the data has been relayed over, the virtual model can then run simulations, study issues and generate potential improvements, with the aim being to generate valuable insights that can then be applied to the original system or object.

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