Utilities
Utilities in the United Kingdom, Ireland and globally are consistently under scrutiny
With a combination of increasing demand and growth, ageing assets and cost pressures, means there is a constant challenge for water, gas, electricity and telecommunication companies.
WRc has a long track record in adapting services to address these challenges and fully understands what utility companies require from us. Customer and regulatory demands are a common theme across every type of utility, and we know that our services must support.
Challenges faced by the industry
The challenges are ever increasing and demanding. End customers and regulators are putting more expectations across all aspects of forecasting, delivery and reporting, whilst utilities companies must still provide a high level and efficient service.
- Affordability has been the keyword over recent years, with utilities balancing asset condition and serviceability, with available capital spend.
- The regulatory reporting requirements of Ofwat and Ofgem with performance-based metrics has also required utilities to manage programmes to achieve the best regulatory outcomes.
- Balancing service with available investment has meant that limited proactive investment has taken place and both infrastructure and non-infrastructure assets are continuing to age.
- The demand on the network is significant for all utilities compounded by population growth, increased demand, emerging requirements of data centres and hubs at the same time as climate change is affecting supply and demand.
- Asset resilience is now a major factor as utilities manage increase demand with a backdrop of potential failure on key assets. Investment on the backbone assets such as the strategic pipelines has been limited over recent years but is now becoming more important, as all utilities look to take a more strategic approach to network management. This is also critical on a national scale as is being implemented with the RAPID Strategic Regional Options schemes.
Support across the entire investment lifecycle
WRc can provide support to utilities across the entire investment life cycle from business planning, asset planning and asset delivery to operations regulatory reporting.
We understand the key industry drivers of robust asset management and prioritise supporting utilities and regulators with asset strategies and national guidance documents that support targeted investment. Financial investment challenges, alongside climate change, has increased the need for a much greater understanding of asset resilience, which WRc is currently supporting utility companies to manage.
WRc hosts a series of asset resilience working groups both from an organisational perspective and the specific assets themselves. One area of interest is the strategic supply network and trunk mains. WRc provides strategic and technical support including pipeline inspection for many utilities in this area, ensuring that utilities can successfully manage and proactively maintain key assets and reduce the risk of critical failures, outages and customer impact.