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National Grid Partners

When it comes to the transition to wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy, the stakes are extremely high and speed is key. Scientists and world leaders generally agree we must cut carbon dioxide emissions roughly in half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. To meet those goals, energy companies need to move swiftly. As the energy transition company, National Grid is working hard to find innovative ways of decarbonizing the energy system. We're working with Risilience as one way to help meet these challenges.

Finding a Path to Climate Transition with Risilience

As nations grapple with the need to curb carbon emissions, businesses face an often-nebulous risk. Scientists say the world needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to limit global warming, and many companies have entered the race to help tackle climate change. But most research indicates those corporate climate goals are rarely supported by credible infrastructure.

Founded at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Risk Studies in 2021, Risilience is a climate intelligence platform that helps businesses properly assess their climate risk and navigate toward net-zero carbon emissions. And the company’s SaaS platform turns client data into actionable insights to help mitigate that climate risk. Through digital twin technology, Risilience lets companies use their own internal systems and databases across five critical components to create a set of customized risk models. These components include financials, key facilities, climate footprint, market breakdown, and raw materials (supply chain).

“The understanding of climate risk was vague and very qualitative even a year or two ago,” explains Tom Sabbatelli-Goodyer, Vice President of Client Solutions at Risilience. “Having a starting point to understand the dollar amount of that risk — and moving toward a more rigorous way of understanding balance sheet impact — is really impactful for a company.”

 In leveraging Risilience’s technology, National Grid is taking concrete steps toward its goal of reaching net zero by 2050 — and its vision for a greener, more sustainable future.

What’s the Story?

“Having a starting point to understand the dollar amount of that risk — and moving toward a more rigorous way of understanding balance sheet impact — is really impactful for a company.”

National Grid's UK-based Electricity Transmission business (NGET), which owns and maintains the high-voltage electricity network in England and Wales, has made considerable investments in its network to connect more low-carbon generation sources. By transporting electricity through thousands of miles of power lines and substations to local distribution networks, NGET plays a crucial role in turning the UK’s net-zero ambitions into a reality — so it seemed like a logical starting point for a collaboration between National Grid and Risilience.

“The thing that excited us from a Grid perspective was being able to take those bits of data that existed around energy transmission, bring them together, make them consistent, and then dig into the financials,” says Liam Goucher, Climate Transition Manager at National Grid. With Risilience, the NGET team was able to model the capital and operational costs of climate initiatives, factoring those costs into future performance across a range of emission scenarios. “It started to make us think about how we can use that across different parts of the business and how we can replicate that approach.”

Before working with Risilience, NGET lacked a solution to streamline the data it procured for its business and climate strategies, said Goucher. “We had sustainability and environmental experts working on the strategy around decarbonization, and we had finance professionals working on future OpEx and CapEx and the opportunities from those initiatives,” he said. “But we had not fully linked the two before, certainly not in a consistent way.” Risilience’s focus on supply chain data dove into the carbon footprint of some of NGET’s raw materials, such as the cement and steel used in construction and the emissions of third-party service providers. That additional analysis bridged the climate and global procurement teams while linking decarbonization strategies with financial impact.

Together, Risilience and NGET modeled five initiatives devised by NGET’s strategy team toward National Grid’s net-zero emission goals. Using its digital twin technology, Risilience identified the initiative with the most profound impact on emission reduction: Connecting renewables to the power grid.

Risilience also helped rank lesser-impact initiatives, establishing a hierarchy of priorities for the NGET team and identifying the most efficient path for resources. The pilot project carved out a pathway for a full net-zero plan that stretches to 2030 and found NGET’s initiatives remain cost-effective even under more ambitious climate scenarios.

One particular initiative, involving National Grid’s transition to electric vehicles, showed savings of £3.5 million in total operating expenses, while reducing cumulative Scope 1 emissions by 57,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2030.

“I think this project gets to the heart of identifying areas where resource allocation can yield the greatest benefits,” Goucher said of the pilot. “If you have constrained resources or you’re only able to implement so many of these initiatives, you can focus your decarbonization strategy on the areas that are most significant.”

Making companies more comfortable with the uncertainty in their climate transition plans is central to the Risilience mission. “You have to embrace some level of ambiguity,” Sabbatelli-Goodyer said. “A lot of companies need to start somewhere, because it helps to just take that first step. When you’re seeing the results of an analysis, you then can realize where the gaps are.”

Risilience is all about helping companies bridge the data gaps that prevent them from tackling climate transition.