Guest Post: Northern Gas Networks—Transforming Asset Investment Planning

This is a guest contribution from Utility Week, a provider of news, insight, and impact analysis for water, gas, and electric utilities in the UK.

In this article, Utility Week recaps a recent webinar featuring Copperleaf™ and Northern Gas Networks (NGN), and reviews the combination of asset management strategy overhaul and decision analytics which put NGN’s RIIO2 business plan into a class of one.

The Utility Week webinar featured Ian Coates, Asset Strategy Lead for NGN, and Stefan Sadnicki, Managing Director for Copperleaf EMEA, who discussed the transformation of NGN’s asset investment planning processes while ramping up for RIIO-2 delivery.

Given the significant changes underway in the UK energy sector and the drive towards net zero, utilities are being challenged to deliver increased value for their customers and stakeholders through innovative and cost-effective investment plans. Coates described how the business plan submitted to Ofgem, Britain’s independent energy regulator, had to demonstrate “a consistent application and implementation of cost benefit analyses”, and how those analyses had to be applied for each asset and across the business as a whole. NGN has been working with Copperleaf since 2016 to support the development of its 5 year regulatory submission for RIIO-2 and was recognized by Ofgem for the quality of its business plan with the promise of a £1.6 million reward.

We’ve developed our value framework, which underpins the C55 system [to give us] a consistent approach to valuing projects and schemes, and even strategies across our asset base.

Ian Coates
Asset Strategy Lead
Northern Gas Networks

Coates went on to say that Copperleaf’s Decision Analytics solution has been key in allowing NGN to respond confidently to the introduction of the Network Asset Risk Metrics (NARMs) methodology.

Read the full article on the Utility Week website to learn more about NGN’s transformation and find out what’s next on its asset management journey.

Learn more about our partnership with NGN.