Optimised Asset Investment Planning at NGET

National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales. The company manages more than sixty thousand assets and delivers an investment plan of £800 million – £1 billion a year. This plan includes asset management work such as asset replacement or refurbishment due to the assets’ condition, risk or age, the connection of new and existing customers to the network, as well as policy-based maintenance.

NGET is at the heart of a changing energy system. The company is playing a pivotal role in helping the United Kingdom reach net zero by investing in the network to connect more low carbon electricity to the grid. NGET realized that adapting its asset management approach and improving its understanding of risk and value would be key to maintaining the reliability of the network and supporting net zero goals.

The Solution IFS Copperleaf AIP, including IFS Copperleaf Portfolio™ and Asset Aware, provides National Grid with a complete view of interventions and expenditure, including all maintenance and customer connection/ network growth activities. IFS Copperleaf and NGET also worked together on the development of a new circuit optimization capability that allows NGET to bundle asset interventions and minimise circuit outage requirements. nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission

The Results The IFS Copperleaf solution provides a centralised platform for monetized risk, asset intervention planning and circuit optimization.

Benefits include: • � Higher value plans—enhanced asset

lifecycle modelling leading to improved risk management and the ability to select the right interventions at the right time and the right cost for consumers. By using IFS Copperleaf, NGET has boosted the annual average total value of their maintenance plans by £900m, a 270% increase.

• � Reduced maintenance—replacing frequency-based planning with risk-based optimization has reduced maintenance volumes to meet policy by 17%, worth £4.4m over five years.

• � Improved planning efficiency—halving the time to build the plan from 12 weeks to just six.

• � Reduction in annual outage costs—the IFS Copperleaf solution helps NGET align capital and maintenance work, increasing the number of interventions per outage and saving £2.5m per year in outage setup costs.

http://nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission

INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO TO 2026

£9 Billion

OVERHEAD LINES

7,000 KM

UNDERGROUND CABLE

700 KM

TOWERS

21,900

SUBSTATIONS

300

Key Drivers for Change

NGET is responsible for facilitating the ongoing energy transition, enabling decarbonization, and maintaining security of supply at the lowest cost to its customers.

Having originally relied on a frequency-based maintenance process, NGET recognized the need to switch to a solution that assesses risk and value on a consistent basis. The company was also looking for opportunities to align work and take advantage of intelligent bundling, reducing the need for multiple outages to achieve the highest possible value.

Proactive Risk Management

The changing nature of the grid, along with increased replacement, refurbishment, and maintenance activity on an ageing network, requires complex decisions and investments to be made. NGET needed to be able to assess risk more regularly, with the capacity to incorporate various constraints, analyze multiple scenarios and evaluate the impact of changing dynamics.

Replacing Disconnected Tools and Manual Processes

NGET needed one centralised solution that could integrate all its data in a single platform, without having to manage multiple spreadsheets, tools and software. This will allow users to directly access models and use them locally, improving efficiency, data quality and transparency to support regulatory reporting. In this one system, NGET will be able to incorporate life-cycle value and detailed asset level FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) models to assist with outage planning.

Optimized Asset Investment Planning

NGET manages more than sixty thousand assets, such as circuits, relays, transformers etc. These assets need periodic maintenance, and outages are required to perform these interventions. Every outage comes with an associated direct and indirect cost, and must be carefully coordinated to avoid disrupting the electricity transmission network.

To reduce the cost and frequency of outages, NGET wanted the ability to plan asset interventions, as well as any licensed investment and unlicensed customer work, on multiple assets within the same circuit. The optimized plan would need to consider different goals and constraints, including running several what-if scenarios to understand how different constraints would impact risk and value.

Improved Operational and Strategic Alignment

Planners need to build tactical and strategic plans that include capital projects and asset sustainment works, ensuring these plans meet resource, budgetary and outage constraints—within an acceptable level of risk—while providing the highest value to the customer. As plans change, NGET also needs to be able to compare options at a circuit level and determine the relative value of using one outage plan versus another. Aligning these operational and strategic approaches will allow the organization to provide sufficient operational support, optimize decision making, and deliver on strategic goals and targets.

Increasing Visualization Requirementst

NGET wanted a clear view of the difference in value between options involving a greater or lesser degree of bundling of works on equipment within the circuit—without having to spend time running additional programmes or amalgamating the data. The company needed high-quality visualization options that would incorporate their existing tools, simulate multiple constraints, and provide clear, accessible and transparent information.

Solution Overview Asset Risk Modelling

NGET uses the IFS Copperleaf solution to understand the impact that an investment will have on the risk or condition of an asset or asset class. NGET is able to model different failure modes and calculate the product of the Probability of Failure (PoF) and the monetized Consequence that each Failure (CoF) could lead to. By monetizing risk in this way, a common currency is created across different asset classes, enabling planners to compare dissimilar investment strategies and make logical trade-offs. The organization can also run changes to the monetized risk model for analysis and iterative improvement of Asset Risk Models.

As a regulated business, NGET is incentivized to deliver low carbon, low cost investments. Monetizing risk allows the company to plan according to performance measures agreed upon with the regulator, therefore ensuring these targets and incentives are consistently fulfilled.

Circuit Optimization

NGET and IFS Copperleaf worked together to combine the power of IFS Copperleaf AIP, its consulting and software development expertise, and the engineering knowledge and prototypes that have been nurtured within NGET over the years.

The innovative solution enables NGET to run network-wide optimizations involving more than 60,000 assets. These optimizations consider more than 5,000 interventions per year, 50 teams, each with up to five different resource types, and 100 overlapping boundaries for circuit constraint management.

Benefits and Improvements Realized One Centralised Platform

Risk monetization, asset intervention planning, and circuit optimization can now be managed together in one simple, centralised platform. The Copperleaf solution integrates internal and external data, meaning the company no longer has to rely on multiple tools, spreadsheets or tedious manual processes—NGET can find everything they need on a single screen in the Copperleaf solution.

The solution has been embedded across strategic, tactical, and operational planning at NGET, and underpins the move from frequency-based maintenance to risk-based maintenance. At the strategic level, the organization can use the system to create and adapt long-term plans, while the tactical team can provide decision support for annual plans. IFS Copperleaf also assists operational planning by informing trade-offs between asset interventions within an outage.

Higher Value Plans

Selecting the right interventions at the right time and the right cost has given NGET the ability to optimize investment planning and decision-making across a longer-term horizon, and achieve impressive cost savings through monetized risk. Using IFS Copperleaf, NGET has increased the annual average total value of maintenance plans by over 270%.

The IFS Copperleaf solution allows NGET to calculate asset risk in real time according to any number of constraints, supporting the company to proactively and continuously manage risk in line with their business needs. This enables them to monitor asset health against policy end dates, and ensure reliability and safety rules are strictly adhered to.

Prior to IFS Copperleaf, NGET used a frequency-based approach to maintenance planning and manually bundled work to optimize interventions per outage. Now, NGET leverages the IFS Copperleaf solution to plan maintenance using a risk-based optimization that maximizes the value of work delivered within outage and resource constraints. This approach has reduced maintenance volumes to meet policy by 17%, worth £4.4m over five years.

Improved Planning Efficiency

The IFS Copperleaf solution has bridged the gap between strategic, tactical and operational planning processes. This is expected to improve planning efficiency by 50 per cent and reduce the time needed to build the plan for the fiscal year from 12 weeks to just six.

The ability to quickly carry out what-if analyses has proven vital in situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, where NGET had to deconstruct and rebuild the plan under a range of different scenarios. IFS Copperleaf has also helped to reveal long-term resource requirements and pinch points across the network, where NGET needs to recruit and build resource capacity.

Outage requirements are down across the network. Compared to manual bundling, the optimization for the FY21 plan has increased the ‘Bundling Ratio’ (number of interventions per outage) by 80%. This has saved at least 1,000 network outages and £2.5m per year in corresponding outage setup costs.

Effective Visualizations

To facilitate scenario planning, IFS Copperleaf allows NGET to visualize multiple restraints with a range of simulations. The solution has integrated some of NGET’s own visualization tools, including its Risk Support Tool, to provide planners with a holistic view and ensure that the most valuable investments can be identified.

Now, stakeholders are able to clearly see the relationship between value model calculations, risk definitions, value measures and the organization’s own strategic goals. Planners can use this robust, transparent data to link back to inputs and model logic when justifying or defending investments, which they can then use to show stakeholders at every level—asset owners, board directors, regulators and so on—the information that matters most to them.

Find out more For more information, contact us

or visit our website at copperleaf.com

Working with the IFS Copperleaf solution enables us to make better decisions much faster at a team level and an executive level. It has created a value- based decision-making framework that has enabled us to create a much better asset investment plan that is more efficient and better for our customers and internal stakeholders.” Stewart Whyte Head of Network Control and Transformation

https://www.copperleaf.com/