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 realised 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
The Copperleaf® Decision Analytics Solution, including 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. Copperleaf and NGET also worked together on the development of a new circuit optimisation capability that allows NGET to bundle asset interventions and minimise circuit outage requirements.
The Results
The Copperleaf solution provides a centralised platform for monetised risk, asset intervention planning and circuit optimisation.
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 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 optimisation 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 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.