Plans for £1.2bn weather ‘supercomputer’ as utilities grapple with storm aftermath

As utility companies pick up the pieces from a second consecutive weekend of extreme weather, the government has promised to strengthen the country’s resilience by investing £1.2 billion in the world’s most advanced weather and climate forecaster.

The “supercomputer” will provide data to more accurately predict storms, select the most suitable locations for flood defences and predict changes to the global climate.

It will be managed by the Met Office and share data with the Environment Agency and the energy sector.

The new model will replace the Met Office Cray supercomputers as they begin to reach the end of their life in late 2022. It will take ten years to completely replace these capabilities but within the first six years the Met Office’s computing capacity will have increased six-fold, the government said. A further three times increase in supercomputing capacity will be sought for years six to 10.

While the project as a whole will have an investment of £1.2 billion, the expected contractual value for the supercomputing capability is £854 million. Other costs include investment in the Observations Network, exploiting the capabilities of the supercomputer and the programme office costs.

The move was welcomed by the Energy Networks Association, whose director of external affairs, Ross Easton, said: “As we have seen from storms Ciara and Dennis, our energy networks are more resilient than ever before thanks to years of continued investment by our members. We welcome this move by the UK government to strengthen weather forecasting technology, providing greater forecasting accuracy. It will allow our members to make even better plans during future storms and, ultimately, help keep the lights on in the worst of weather.”

The newly-appointed business and energy secretary, Alok Sharma, said: “Over the last 30 years, new technologies have meant more accurate weather forecasting, with storms being predicted up to five days in advance.

“Come rain or shine, our significant investment for a new supercomputer will further speed up weather predictions, helping people be more prepared for weather disruption from planning travel journeys to deploying flood defences.”

The announcement comes as utility companies were thrown into action at the weekend to tackle the fallout from Storm Dennis.

Severn Trent said today that it had deployed extra teams to respond as quickly as possible, with the worst hit areas and most vulnerable customers prioritised.

Meanwhile, a Yorkshire Water spokesperson told Utility Week that staffing in the contact centre had been increased by 50 per cent and there were an extra 43 technicians in the field.

The spokesperson said: “We doubled our standby numbers across both clean and waste water in critical areas across the business. We also have additional alarm management and technical support working from our central control room, while all our contractors are on escalation to provide support for the main anticipated impact.”

Welsh Water said there had been a “significant impact” from the extreme weather conditions across much of Wales, Herefordshire and Deeside, which saw two months’ rainfall in 48 hours.

A spokesperson said: “Access to our sites has also been hampered in places due to landslides and widespread flooding which has also damaged some of our water mains. In spite of this, we have been able to keep disruption to supplies to a minimum.

“The company’s Gold Command centre, led by managing director, Pete Perry, is ensuring all efforts are being made to maintain our operations 24 /7. This included around 250 employees working throughout the night in extremely challenging conditions.”