Managing Extreme Weather: responding to the unpredictable

Jillian Ambrose reports on the Utility Week Live Keynote conference following a round table debate on the increasingly important need for utilities to plan for unpredictable weather events.

The 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 which followed.

Electricity North West chief executive Steve Johnson told the Keynote conference earlier in the day that despite being unable to send engineers out to address damaged power lines for 12 hours as the storms raged on, the network was still able to restore power to 80 per cent of customers within 3 hours. But the response from networks still drew criticism from the media and members of the energy and climate change select committee.

Since then, networks across the country have put in place tools to enable closer communication with customers who had previously been unaware of the role played by network companies. Johnson noted that his company has identified around 250,000 customers deemed to be particularly vulnerable to ensure that their preparedness ahead of future severe weather and has undertaken resilience testing of its social media channels. The February 2014 storms, he said, “were handled better”. But for many the experience of the Boxing Day outages have already taken a toll on trust.

Southern Water chief executive Matthew Wright, speaking on the same panel, described reputational damage as the “biggest issue” facing utilities. And as severe weather events increase in line with climate change expectations, utilities will need to do more to act before the storms hit.

A roundtable discussion on managing severe weather events identified three key considerations for UK utilities to avoid damage to both assets and reputation:

1. Understand the complexity of long-term weather forecasting
2. Keep a long-term view despite short-term regulatory periods
3. Develop a coherent approach to a multi-impact threat

Understand the complexity of long-term weather forecasting
Event sponsor the Met Office made no bones about saying that climate change is an observable trend which will increase the frequency of severe weather events in the future.

But while its forecasting tools improve with every year, risk remains in predicting the likely impact a weather event might have. For example, a weather event which 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 contractors working within a specific region which may find their resources stretched. Taken to an extreme, a utility could face very real weather-related problems even without any seemingly extraordinary weather at all: after all, a drought is just a very long period of ordinary days when it happened not to rain, the Met Office noted. For genuinely historic weather events the Met Office is able to give advanced warning which, at 2-5 days is extremely accurate, but utilities will need to have coping plans in place long before the call comes.

Keep a long-term view despite short-term regulatory periods
The 5-8 year regulatory periods enforcing innovation can cause water and networks companies to take a shorter-term approach than what is needed to develop an adaption plan in line with the long term trend emerging in severe weather patterns, the roundtable agreed. In addition, trends in population distribution and housing development (often in flood plains) may also occur at broader timescales than the view allows in terms of complying to sorter regulatory periods. The approach, by nature is long-term and evoloving which requires a response similar in timescale, the delegates noted.

Develop a coherent approach to a multi-impact threat
A severe storm would have big implications not only for networks and water companies, but also for road, rail and emergency services and include the need for reaction from the Environment Agency and local councils. But at present plans for adaption to climate change have taken a ‘silo-ed’ approach based on the specific concerns of each service provider. Although co-operations between these entities has increased since the winter 2013/14 storms, managing the long-term implications of a wide-scale trend could benefit from the co-ordination of a big-picture authority, delegates suggested. One pointed out that the UK Regulators Networks has already established a climate change adaption working group, and this may help provide guidance to navigate many of the concerns moving forward.

The roundtable agreed that perhaps the biggest threat facing utilities in terms of managing extreme weather events is a ‘head in the sand’ approach to the worst case scenarios. Customers are unlikely to be sympathetic to companies which fail to anticipate severe weather, they agreed. And they are unlikely to accept excuses about the unforeseeable nature of specific events.
“Unprecedented weather is the new precedent,” one said.