Where the Risk Lives — Part 1

Another Cable…

It feels like every few weeks another headline appears.

A damaged subsea cable.

A fire at an electrical substation.

Another storm rolling towards the UK.

A government minister talking about “protecting critical national infrastructure.”

Sometimes it’s sabotage.

Sometimes it’s weather.

Sometimes it’s just bad luck.

Whatever the cause, the same sentence always seems to follow.

“Fortunately, there are contingency plans.”

Looking at the Map

The strange thing is…

I don’t actually know where most of Britain’s energy infrastructure is.

I know we have offshore wind farms.

I know there are oil and gas platforms in the North Sea.

I know electricity somehow makes its way from those places to my house.

But if you handed me a blank map of Britain, I couldn’t tell you where most of it actually lives.

That feels… odd.

Considering how often we’re told it’s critical infrastructure.

It’s Probably More Complicated Than I Think

The more I thought about it, the more questions appeared.

If a storm hits the east coast…

…which offshore wind farms are affected?

If flooding hits an estuary…

…which substations are nearby?

If several assets sit close together…

…does that create a bigger insurance risk than if they’re spread out?

And perhaps the biggest question of all…

How do insurance companies even keep track of all this?

The Answer?

I don’t know.

But let’s build a way to find out together.

Using public datasets from organisations like The Crown Estate, OpenStreetMap, and the North Sea Transition Authority, I’m going to build a pipeline that maps Britain’s energy infrastructure onto natural hazard data.

Storm tracks.

Flood zones.

Seismic information.

Anything publicly available that helps answer a surprisingly simple question:

What assets do we have on risk, and where are they?

The Goal

By the end of this project I want an interactive map that anyone can explore.

Behind that map will be the interesting part.

Collecting data from multiple public sources.

Cleaning inconsistent geospatial data.

Building repeatable ingestion pipelines.

Joining assets to hazard layers.

Publishing something that’s always up to date rather than another static spreadsheet.

Because the map is really just the final product.

The engineering behind it is the project.

And who knows…

With the way the last few years have gone, I suspect it’ll prove useful sooner rather than later.

Gareth Winterman