Digital whole life carbon assessment (DgWLCA)

Completed

Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Project Contact
National Grid Electricity Transmission

Network Innovation Allowance

Ofgem

01 August 2024

31 August 2025

ENA months

£122,100

Power

London

Network Innovation Allowance

Project Contact, National Grid Electricity Transmission

Mott Macdonald (MM) will act as a supplier and will provide the digital solution, Moata Carbon Portal, alongside consultancy support to make sure it works for our users and provides the outputs we need. The work will involve initial discussions between NGET and the supplier to understand the key requirements. The supplier will review the existing CIT tool and the databases like CAT and ALPACA. The supplier will include all the lifecycle stages of the assets and will use key assumptions where the project or asset-specific data is not available. The supplier will then develop a methodology for operational emissions relating to the transmission losses and fugitive emissions. This will be tested, agreed, and produce a dashboard including client overview. Initial testing will be conducted including BIM (Building information modelling) integration to demonstrate the efficacy. Further testing will be carried out within NGET and within the supply chain. Based on the feedback and regular reviews, troubleshooting of the bugs will be done and the tool will be updated based on the feedback from the pilot. The final digital tool will be launched and will replace the existing CIT tool used by NGET teams, contractors, and designers.? The scope of digital whole life carbon assessment tool will be aligned with National Grids requirements, the supplier has in-house experience and expertise relating to the carbon tools and the development process will involve discussions between the NGET team and carbon management experts in MM. This will allow the tool developers to discuss specifics relating to the requirements and to determine whether the digital tool includes all the relevant assets/components. This is a high TRL development project which further enhances the capability of existing digital tool for bespoke solutions and recommendations provided to NGET. Over the 12-month project, the study will provide whole life carbon assessment through a digital tool allowing NGET to measure and manage carbon reduction towards our targets. The tool will retain the use of existing database and will draw on other datasets to supplement these databases, which can be updated annually. The tool will be used across project teams, designers, and contractors at different project stages. CIT has some apparent issues like prone to human errors, challenges to update over long-term project, and is time consuming due to excel-based tool however the scope of the project includes the identification of less-known limitations of existing CIT tool and address them accordingly. Develop UKs first transmission whole life carbon digital tool.Develop integrated functions for our supply chain to use and identify carbon hotspots.Develop benchmarks for the UK energy sector usingnested asset functionality.Integrate AI low carbon optimisation suggesting optimisations.Centralise CIT access and low carbon decision making.

National Grid (NG) has commitments to NGET Environmental Action Plan to reduce emissions and uses carbon interface tool (CIT) for embodied carbon calculation. NG needs to move to Whole life carbon assessments to align to best practice and PAS2080. Being an Excel-based, CIT is prone to human errors, and it is challenging to update over long-term projects. This project aims to develop the UKs 1st Transmissions whole life carbon digital (DgWLCA) tool allowing NG to measure and manage carbon reduction towards our targets. Digital tool will retain use of existing databases and will be updated annually. We selected an existing Mott McDonald developed tool as a baseline and intend to do bespoke innovative modifications like AI low carbon optimization and intuitive energy-specific onboarding.

02/04/25