Case Study: British Energy

The Smith Institute helped British Energy to refresh their in-house statistical capability with a bespoke training course.

British Energy, is part of EDF Energy, which is the UK’s biggest producer of electricity and distributes power to a quarter of the country’s population. With a current installed capacity of around 16.5GW, it supplies gas and electricity to over 5.5 million business and residential customers from a fleet of  nuclear, coal and gas power stations, as well as combined heat and power plants and wind farms.

The Smith Institute worked with British Energy to provide training in advanced statistical techniques relevant to their operations to refresh the expertise of their existing  staff  and to develop the skills of new employees.  The Institute staff developed course material to fit with British Energy’s Systematic Approach to Training, and delivered the course over 2.5 days in March 2009.  The course was a mixture of theory, principles and hands-on practical exercises drawn from British Energy’s own examples.  Topics include hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, small datasets, regression, maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian statistics and Monte-Carlo methods, with additional background information provided on basic probability, random variables, and specific standard distributions.

David Ogle, Group Head of Safety Case Development for British Energy, said, “We chose the Smith Institute to help us develop this advanced training session because of their expertise in applying complex mathematics in an industrial setting. The course tutors were adept at conveying complex ideas in an accessible way.  The Smith Institute took complete ownership of the course development and its alignment with British Energy's processes and kept us informed of progress throughout.”