7. Enable and manage

Growing use of electric vehicles to decarbonise transport and the transition away from reliance on fossil fuels for heating will place greater demand on the electricity network. As a result, investing to improve resilience and capacity will be essential over the coming years to support the drive to net zero.

“Energy networks play a key role in facilitating customers’ decarbonisation aims and objectives and they also need to facilitate the execution of government policies around decarbonisation too,” explained Energy Networks Association director of electricity systems David Boyer. “However, supporting that demand and enabling those policy objectives isn’t straightforward.”

Energy Networks Association’s David Boyer said investment in the electricity network is critical to decarbonisation

Demand for new connections is already increasing and David reports that in 2022, transmission applications – requests for new electricity supplies – exceeded 164GW which has resulted in a significant queue. “We need to respond to make sure we can provide access to the grid for these projects,” said David.

To respond, infrastructure investment is needed but the current planning structure creates challenges, according to David.

Investing for the future

Coordination across the electricity supply system, as well as with the gas networks, is a key role for the Energy Networks Association which represents 12 network operators across the UK and Ireland.

Despite the challenges in building new infrastructure, David said that members of the association are investing, with £40bn expected to be spent on reinforcement of the existing network and new infrastructure over the next five years.

Energy networks play a key role in facilitating customers’ decarbonisation aims.

Nonetheless, David explained that what to invest in, when and how is challenging for the association’s members with a raft of government policy and publications issued over the last couple of years that impact or inform the need for network infrastructure. “There has been a lot of movement in this space and politics cannot be avoided in this context,” said David, who also pointed to external factors like the war in Ukraine and its effect on driving the cost of living crisis as also having an impact on energy network investment decisions.

Driving innovation

Research led by the Energy Network Association is supporting the industry to cope with the change needed to back decarbonisation, as well as to improve efficiency in the existing network. As an example, David said that the Innovation Programme is integrating and rolling out new technologies, practices and markets and help to tackle the net zero challenge. He added that the focus was not just on electricity though and the association’s Gas Goes Green programme is researching, co-ordinating and implementing the changes needed to convert Britain’s 284,000km of gas network infrastructure to run on hydrogen and biomethane.

Although the UK currently has one of the most reliable energy networks in the world, David concluded that increased focus on resilience now will also be key to supporting greater reliance on the electricity network too.

Focusing on decarbonisation on a project by project basis will not be sufficient to get us to net zero as a sector, region or national economy. Instead, Mott MacDonald technical director for decarbonisation and co-author of carbon management standard PAS 2080 Maria Manidaki urged the sector to consider their projects from a systems perspective.

The need for the change of approach and how to go about it was set out in the updated PAS 2080 standard which was unveiled at Carbon Crunch in 2022 and published in April. However, Maria believes that publication of the standard is just the start, rather than the end point and more knowledge is needed to effectively apply decarbonisation at a systems level.

Mott MacDonald’s Maria Manidaki told the Carbon Crunch audience that asset level only approaches will not get us to net zero and that systems thinking is vital 

“When we are talking about systems in terms of PAS 2080, we are talking about the interconnection of physical facilities and human interactions,” she explained. “However, in developing the standard, we struggled to define what a systems approach may mean for individual asset owners/managers, designers, constructors and product/material suppliers when delivering projects and programmes of work in the built environment.”

PAS 2080 recognises that there is a nested relationship between assets, networks and systems. An asset could be a building, a bridge or a pumping station. A network could be a building development, a road or rail network or a wastewater network. While a system a sector of infrastructure, such as transport or water, or it could be a geography, or a development, such as a city or a region. The challenge is who in a system is best placed to set decarbonisation targets and have the right level of control in managing whole life carbon emissions. It is never one single player in the value chain.

Systems level thinking

Maria said: “The point here is that we have traditionally been focusing on decarbonising and reducing capital and operational carbon at the asset level because that is more practical and where we understand it better. However, focusing on a specific asset alone will not get us to net zero and we need to be looking at the issue from a system level.”

PAS 2080 identifies the different value chain members who are involved in planning and delivering buildings, infrastructure and programmes of work and gives specific guidance for each group. Each of those value chain members have different levels of direct control over emissions and PAS 2080 recognises how they can each influence things.

Focusing on a specific asset alone will not get us to net zero.

Essentially it empowers everyone to see how they can have an impact and means that people working at an asset level do not have to wait for government policy to tell them what to do. However, it also sends a clear message about the responsibilities to those who have more direct control from a policy perspective.

“But many people ask what a systems approach practically means for them as engineers?” said Maria.

Water industry

Maria used the water sector as an example where stakeholders have been starting to have discussions to better articulate what the different performance outcomes to 2050 and beyond may mean for the sector’s emissions and decisions to mitigate those. “We have been involved in discussions with water companies, regulators, government and other stakeholders,” she said. “We know that as a sector, we will have to build a lot of new infrastructure over the next 25 to 30 to 50 years to meet the regulatory requirements in the UK to help reduce the risk from drought or address pollution incidents in our rivers from storm water overflows. At the same time, we need to integrate more nature-based solutions and decarbonise operations by 2050.

“We currently do not know what the exact impact of our future emissions will be by meeting all those performance outcomes by 2050. We also don’t have a clear sector-level decarbonisation target that covers whole life emissions to 2050 – the equivalent of a carbon budget. Without taking a top-down systems view and having transparent discussions with the companies, regulators and government, it will be difficult to understand the scale of the challenge for decarbonising our construction and operational emissions by 2050 in line with Government trajectories, such as the UK Net Zero balanced pathway to 2050.”

What does a systems approach practically mean?

Systems approach benefits

Nonetheless, Maria says that many asset owners in infrastructure and buildings have started to bring systems thinking to the asset level and pointed to case studies in the PAS 2080 guidance documents. These are examples of individual assets or networks being able to unlock additional decarbonisation benefits at the wider geographical system. “One example is Anglian Water exporting waste heat from a waste treatment works and transferring it to a commercial tomato grower’s greenhouse,” she explains. Green hydrogen production that brings wider co-benefits in decarbonising the construction effort of a major project and use in the wider system is also something asset owners have started to consider when planning for new projects and programmes of work.

According to Maria, collaboration will be key to taking a systems approach. “But the when and how we collaborate is important too,” she said.