Utilities and infrastructure resilience event - the key take away for Karl Schultz
Channel: Resilience Rising
Date: 2020-02-05

Karl Schultz, Executive Chairman, The Higher Ground Foundation, provided us with some quick insights from our event on Utilities and infrastructure resilience. See event report at https://www.resilienceshift.org/utilities-resilience

Utility providers have a difficult line to tread between managing customer expectations on cost and service, against investing in future-focused infrastructure resilience. When they get it right, it’s rare that they get praised. But when a crisis happens they can be the first to be blamed by consumers.

There are water shocks and stresses in many cities globally, and power outages happen consistently in many countries, though rarely in the developed world. With the UK’s unexpected power outage of 9 August 2019 relatively recent, and the context of Cape Town’s water crisis setting the scene for The Resilience Shift’s work on urban water resilience, it seemed timely to bring together guests from across the utilities sector to share resilience best practice.

The focus of the event was to build understanding of the interdependency of systems and to share best practice that could inform the discussion about how best to build infrastructure resilience. Guests represented regulatory bodies, utilities operators and asset owners for water, power, as well as resilience specialists and other interested parties.

The Resilience Shift in partnership with Resilience First brought together a panel comprising Min Zhu, Deputy Director, Electricity Transmission, Systems and Networks at Ofgem; David Wright, Director, Electricity and Group Electricity Chief Engineer, National Grid and Richard Aylard, Sustainability Director, Thames Water; Martin Shouler, Associate Director and London Water Leader at Arup (representing The Resilience Shift); with guest dinner speaker Suleman Alli, Director of Strategy at UK Power Networks.