Episode 11: When one failure becomes many: CReDo and the future of infrastructure resilience

Future of Utilities Podcast 

When one failure becomes many: CReDo and the future of infrastructure resilience 

Lindley Gooden: Hello, I’m Lindley Gooden. Welcome to the Future of Utilities podcast. Let’s talk about climate resilience and infrastructure networks – where are we? Are we more disjointed than we need to be, and a few other issues besides, with Alanna Gluck from Catapult. Great to have you here. And secondly, we have Amit Bhave from CMCL. Great to have you both with us. Alanna, tell us a little more about yourself first. 

Alanna Gluck: Hi everyone, my name’s Alanna. I’m engagement lead for the Climate Resilience Decision Optimiser programme, currently led by UK Power Networks and funded through the Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund. I’m also a senior consultant in the digital and data practice at Connected Places Catapult. 

Lindley Gooden: Perfect, great to have you here. And Amit, please tell us more about yourself. 

Amit Bhave: Hi everyone, great to be here, thank you very much. I’m the commercial co-lead for CReDo, as Alanna explained. My day job is running a tech company in Cambridge called CMCL. As part of that company, we’ve developed a cross-sector digital twin approach, which forms the backbone of CReDo. 

Lindley Gooden: Brilliant. Understandably, until now, when businesses have looked at climate resilience, they’ve tended to look at their own resources – we haven’t been joining up the entire system, because it’s hard to do. Why is a more systems-wide, integrated approach so important, and why can we achieve it now? 

Amit Bhave: It’s increasingly important that we take a joined-up approach to climate change, because climate events – Storm Arwen, for example – don’t respect sector boundaries. An impact on one sector can cascade into another, and that’s really what we’re trying to understand in developing CReDo as a platform: how do we unpack the interdependencies between these systems, understand how climate risk cascades across them, and identify the critical points where we can create physical interventions and adapt our ageing infrastructure? 

Lindley Gooden: Climate events have no respect for infrastructure – they just do whatever they do. Technically, it’s been very difficult just to join up your own systems, never mind systems from outside, to look at the network as a whole. So how is that possible? How do you start to build a more interconnected picture? 

Amit Bhave: To get that interconnected picture, first you need to change your mindset. This isn’t a technical problem – it’s a problem in how you approach this complexity. The ultimate aim is to develop a kind of digital glue that lets people, teams, software, data and models talk and connect to each other. The way we’ve tackled this in CReDo is to engage directly with critical infrastructure operators – telecoms, water, energy – understand how their data is structured, how information moves through their systems, and then encourage them to talk to each other. That connected mindset has been built into CReDo by design, from day one. 

Lindley Gooden: And are you doing that with a layer on top that dips into each dataset? Is that the mechanism – something in the joins? 

Amit Bhave: Good question. It’s not that we’re moving data from all these different locations into one central unit – there have been approaches like that in the past, and the problem is they don’t work. They’re not scalable, not modular enough, not LEGO-like, where you can start small and build up. It’s very much decentralised. Rather than moving the data to a central location, you build an insight layer, and it’s the insights that cross over and connect. 

Lindley Gooden: Very good – it’s important to spell that out, even visually, so people understand how it’s possible and how the principles work. Weather events cause cascades through different systems, Alanna – any examples from your point of view? Any unpleasant memories of when that’s happened, and how it was fixed? 

Alanna Gluck: I think a lot of people can picture a time they lost power, and then their mobile stopped working, or the water shut off. One of the best examples from recent events is the utilities failure in Spain and Portugal a couple of summers back. A large amount of solar energy was produced on a really hot, sunny day – part of climate change is that we now sometimes generate more energy than we can handle – and the grid that was built to support that solar power couldn’t handle the surge. The grid failed, and it caused a cascading impact: not just energy going down, but telecoms too, and when telecoms goes down, a lot of public services can’t operate, so transport went down as well. That has an even bigger cascading impact, because when these systems go down, people can’t get to work, businesses can’t run, and it actually shows up in a country’s GDP. 

That’s a good concrete international example, but there are UK examples too – the North Hyde incident near Heathrow, where an electrical fault caused a substation to go down. These are examples that are already in the public eye. If we’re able to do predictive resilience, and anticipate what’s going to happen years in advance, we can develop the right mitigations to actually adapt our infrastructure. 

Lindley Gooden: And it’s the workarounds too, isn’t it – if you’re connected more seamlessly, with a wider view, you can start finding technical workarounds that let you keep functioning: dipping into other resources, working differently with first responders, all these different elements. This is real, and we’ve all seen examples of it. 

Alanna Gluck: What we hope happens through CReDo is that by highlighting, through our platform, where the critical vulnerabilities are within those interdependencies, and identifying those critical assets, we start supporting organisations to build more joined-up resilience strategies – allowing them to co-invest, not just financially, but in how they interact with their communities to work toward a shared goal. 

Amit Bhave: I think the thing to note here is that in these cascading failures, there’s always a trigger point. Take Heathrow – a substation going down might also mean a water pump, or an NHS hospital, that depends on it goes down too. There’s a trigger point that then cascades, so within the platform, the model, the insight-gathering, you need to trace that journey. That’s where the complexity is, but it’s also where the opportunity is. 

Lindley Gooden: I guess in some ways what currently happens is the weakest link fails – is that right? Though it could be multiple links, with many parties involved. Is it a case of finding patches, almost, around a particular problem as it arises? 

Amit Bhave: The word “link” is brilliant, because that’s exactly the connectedness – things happen upstream and downstream. If you’re able to isolate an event and understand that point, and there could be multiple such points happening simultaneously, across time and geography… 

Lindley Gooden: And points of stress feed back too, as you say – back into the emergency, and into other systems that weren’t broken the first time round, putting too much pressure on them. 

Amit Bhave: What we’re trying to do is identify any number of vulnerable assets, but also start prioritising the order in which those assets get fixed and maintained. Two assets might carry equal risk individually, but it gets really interesting when one asset – a substation, say – is feeding a number of different assets across other networks. The criticality jumps, because it’s not just about vulnerability to the climate event itself, it’s about the criticality of how that asset serves people and places. 

Lindley Gooden: So you’ve painted the picture – but just define for us what CReDo actually does. What are the key elements? 

Amit Bhave: CReDo stands for the Climate Resilience Decision Optimiser. It’s a connected digital platform that combines asset information from utility companies with climate data and cascading risk models. It generates insights from running those models, to understand where the criticalities are within connected networks, where the highest-value interventions are, and where we can help avoid catastrophes for communities. 

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Lindley Gooden: So now we understand the problem, the breakdown, and the feedback loops – how does that actually help you share data more effectively and start solving these problems? How does the framework work? 

Amit Bhave: I’d add – rather than focusing on sharing data, it’s really about sharing insights, because we want shared understanding, not something that gets misunderstood as literally moving data from one point to another. There’s an insight layer that sits between everything, which is what lets you build that shared understanding. 

Lindley Gooden: So you can paint a picture of the scenarios around you when an emergency happens? 

Amit Bhave: You can literally instantiate it – assets are mapped out geospatially, showing where they are and their current state, and then you can run climate scenarios. There’s a full library of climate scenarios CReDo can provide. From those scenarios, you can assess the risk and impact on individual assets, and how that risk then travels through a neighbouring or connected system, because that operational logic is already embedded before anything happens. 

On data sharing specifically, we’ve designed CReDo around need-to-know security principles, because it’s not the case that everyone should be sharing data all the time. It needs to happen for the right reason, the right outcome, under the right conditions. What we’ve built lets our end users and collaborators securely share information with CReDo and get shared insights back, without compromising their own security. 

Lindley Gooden: That’s such an important point – I wouldn’t even have thought about the privacy element, given how important this infrastructure is, and how important it is to keep response behaviours under wraps too. Let’s talk about regulation for a second. As a country – and I’m sure this is true elsewhere too – we might still be taking a fairly modular, siloed look at issues as climate failures arise, rather than a whole-system approach. What would you like to see from policymakers, Alanna, that might help everyone join up the process? 

Alanna Gluck: I think there’s been incredible progress in regulation, even over the past year or so. There’s been a lot of interest in interdependency thinking, and real appetite for DNOs and water companies alike to build that thinking into their planning processes. I do think there are some structural challenges, which is natural, because these regulatory markets were formed in an era when we didn’t have a strong understanding of interconnectivity, or the value of shared information and data. 

If we could wave a magic wand, one thing that would genuinely help with interdependency challenges is aligning pricing controls across the regulated market. Right now, the energy price control cycle and the water price control cycle don’t line up, which makes it hard for organisations to build joined-up thinking into their business plans and resilience strategies. Another piece is around secure, purposeful data sharing – we need really strong use cases, and policy and regulators can help sectors more broadly understand the value of sharing data securely, when it’s appropriate, for a shared outcome. 

Lindley Gooden: People’s attention is being pulled in a lot of different directions right now, with real pressure on energy and water supply. 

Amit Bhave: Exactly right – they’re interdependent, they’re connected, which also means there needs to be some form of orchestration at the regulatory level too. Because what happens if all the systems are connected, but the regulators themselves are sitting in silos? It just won’t work. The Climate Change Committee’s Well-Adapted UK report actually brings this out quite well – there’s a recognition at policy level that this change in mindset, and the orchestration that goes with it, matter equally. 

Lindley Gooden: So we’re back to mindset – that’s clearly what you think, Amit, that we need a genuine shift there. Final point to you, Alanna – in terms of working together, what could we do, in brief, to make this process work better? 

Alanna Gluck: That’s a very big question. I- 

Lindley Gooden: I only asked for one line, that’s all. 

Alanna Gluck: I’d say this – over the course of developing CReDo from a demonstrator into what’s now an MVP digital platform, it’s been genuinely amazing to see the cross-sector collaboration, and how surprisingly willing organisations are to engage when there’s shared value, shared return on investment, and shared purpose. I’d love to see that scaled up across the UK – not just for the benefit of a project like CReDo, but because ultimately it’s about ensuring continuity of service for the public who depend on these sectors and utilities. 

It’s also worth remembering that a water sector customer is an energy sector customer, is a telecoms customer, is a transport customer. 

Lindley Gooden: And they’re working inside these businesses too. 

Alanna Gluck: Right – and there’s a risk we end up making our customers pay multiple times for essentially the same outcome. There’s real value in recognising that we’re serving the same public, and there’s value in taking that bottom-up, commercial organisation approach, just as much as there’s value in a top-down, government, public-good approach. There’s value in both. 

Lindley Gooden: It helps us all, absolutely. Well, thanks so much for joining us – Amit and Alanna, great to have you with us this afternoon, at the end of day one of the summit. And that’s it for now from the Future of Utilities podcast. Great to have you with us too – see you soon, take care. 

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