CReDO+ (Climate Resilience Decision Optimiser) is a digital platform that uses digital twin technology to help safeguard infrastructure networks against the impacts of climate change. By creating virtual replicas of assets and combining historic and predictive data, it simulates how systems like power lines would perform during extreme weather. CReDO+ brings together data from electricity, water, gas, and telecoms to map interdependencies and identify shared risks, helping operators make smarter investment decisions and build long-term resilience across sectors.
What is the project about?
Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of such events. The Committee on Climate Change has highlighted the risk of cascading failures across interconnected systems, warning that the “connectedness of infrastructure systems means that climate and weather-related impacts in one system can cause large and cascading failures in connected systems.” This concern is echoed by the National Infrastructure Commission, which notes that many organisations still struggle to assess risks arising from infrastructure interdependencies. Energy networks, as central components of critical infrastructure, are particularly exposed to these vulnerabilities.
To address this, CReDO+ will develop a digital twin platform that enhances infrastructure investment planning and provides a better understanding of the systemic risks caused by extreme weather events. Reliable asset models are essential, but traditional machine learning approaches face limitations due to sparse historical failure data and inconsistent levels of digitisation across sectors. Innovation is needed to create scalable solutions that account for diverse weather scenarios, use cases, and network types.
How we’re doing it
The project will develop an enhanced digital twin platform to support more effective investment planning for resilient infrastructure and to improve understanding of the cascading risks posed by extreme weather events such as flooding, extreme heat, and high winds.
Through CReDO+, the project will:
Predict risks to energy networks resulting from extreme weather
Strengthen infrastructure resilience to climate-related threats
Develop practical tools to support strategic planning and investment in climate adaptation
Build on the existing CReDO platform, expanding its capabilities to focus specifically on energy sector resilience
What makes it innovative
CReDO+ offers a novel and forward-thinking solution to building infrastructure resilience by introducing new capabilities to the existing CReDO platform. It will:
Address data gaps by developing probabilistic failure models for extreme heat, improving understanding of asset behaviour under severe weather conditions.
Enhance data granularity for Distribution Network Operators (DNOs), identifying interdependencies across utilities to support coordinated, cross-sector resilience strategies.
Incorporate economic and societal cost data—including recovery, repair, and supply disruption impacts—to help quantify the consequences of failure and strengthen the business case for resilience investment.
Be extensible to other asset types and climate risks, allowing the approach to scale across different sectors and scenarios.
Implement these risk models within the CReDO platform, enabling a deeper understanding of system-level predictability, robustness, and uncertainty quantification.
Deliver a user-friendly digital elicitation tool to support the creation of asset impact risk models with expert input.
To date, CReDO has shown the value of cross-sector collaboration. With CReDO+, the aim is to build an ecosystem of interoperable digital twins that work together to address complex, system-wide climate and resilience challenges.
What we’re learning
During the Alpha phase of CReDO+, we gained key insights that will inform the Beta development stage:
We identified that UK Power Networks and other DNOs are strategically focused on climate adaptation from an operational impact perspective, highlighting the need for tools that go beyond traditional planning approaches.
There is a lack of data to inform asset behaviour models under extreme heat conditions without expert input. As a result, business-as-usual fault forecasting methods are not capable of anticipating the impacts of heatwaves—creating critical gaps in investment planning.
We assessed the applicability of existing climate data for use in Alpha prototyping and confirmed the UK’s capability to generate refined data to support Beta phase deployment.
The project outlined a clear approach to integrating CReDO+ with the original CReDO platform, and its positioning as a digital tool within the wider DNO ecosystem.
We explored modelling principles specific to extreme heat, identifying key differences from earlier work on flooding and informing model refinement.
A wireframe and technical requirements were defined for the digital elicitation tool, including features for a graphical interface and online questionnaire distribution, which will shape the development roadmap for model creation and stakeholder input.
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