RESNET: Resilient Electricity Networks for Great Britain

September 2011 to August 2015

Prof Kevin Anderson, University of Manchester

AIM: To develop and demonstrate a comprehensive approach to analyse, at a national scale, climate-related changes in the reliability of the UK’s electricity system, and to develop tools for quantifying the value of adaptations that would enhance its resilience.

Objectives:

• To develop a weather generator for producing scenarios of spatially coincident weather extremes in future climates at a national scale.

• To apply a weather typing approach to the Regional Climate Models used by UKCP09 to produce a wind storm component for the weather generator.

• To generate spatially and temporally explicit scenarios of future electricity demand and supply, with and without different scales of decentralisation.

• To develop models relating changes in the severity of weather related events to failure rate of individual network components.

• To quantify the potential impacts of future climate upon the operational resilience and the infrastructure resilience of the overall GB power system.

• To explore the societal implications and identify potential barriers to adaptation measures.