How Fluvius Is Preparing Its Future Grid with ElectrifiedGrid™
In Belgium, Fluvius is using ElectrifiedGrid™ to develop capital investment plans for their distribution grid that will remain robust under a wide range of future scenarios.
The Challenge
As the distribution system operator for the Flemish region of Belgium, Fluvius is responsible for operating and planning electricity and gas networks across Flanders, serving more than 7 million customers. Like many European utilities, Fluvius is at the center of the energy transition - but the speed and scale of change facing its grid is unprecedented.
Policy shifts and changing customer behaviour were driving a fundamental shift in electricity demand. Electric vehicle mandates, including the electrification of enterprise car fleets, new residential building standards require 100% electric heating, and the continued expansion of rooftop solar PV, held the potential to rapidly and drastically impact peak loads and consumption patterns across the network.
These forces were not only increasing overall demand, but also making load profiles more volatile, more localized, and harder to predict. Planning based on historical trends or single “most likely” futures was no longer sufficient.
At the same time, new capital works policies limited how often multi-utilities could perform construction at the same location, raising the cost of misaligned investments.
Recognizing that traditional planning approaches - built around historical data and single forecasts - were no longer sufficient, Fluvius sought a way to understand asset-level impacts across many possible futures, target investments precisely, and demonstrate the necessity of those investments to regulators and customers.
The Approach
Fluvius partnered with the ElectrifiedGrid™ team at Deloitte to modernize its long-term planning approach. Together, they aligned on four guiding principles:
- Plan for a range of futures, not a single outcome
- Assess impacts at the asset level, where constraints actually emerge
- Align stakeholders using transparent, evidence-based insights
- Adapt quickly as policy, technology, and demand assumptions evolve
This required a planning platform capable of integrating data, simulating uncertainty at scale, and translating insights into regulator-ready decisions.
The Solution
Using ElectrifiedGrid™, Fluvius consolidated geospatial, customer, and network topology data from multiple existing systems into a unified digital twin of its electricity and gas networks.
This digital twin enabled large-scale, scenario development, load forecasts, and asset-level power flow simulations, providing visibility into substation, transformer, cable, and meter-level impacts.
To ensure planning decisions reflected the full range of possible futures, Fluvius gathered “future belief” inputs from a broad set of stakeholders, including regulators, municipalities, transmission system operators, and peer utilities. Based on these inputs, Fluvius pre-audited more than 150 future scenarios, each reflecting different combinations of technology adoption, consumer behavior, and policy evolution.
For each scenario, ElectrifiedGrid™ generated geospatially disaggregated 8,760-hour load profiles and simulated their impact on network assets (transformers, cables, meters) through 2050. The results were visualized directly on the digital twin, allowing planners to see where congestion would emerge, how often and when assets would be overloaded, and how risks differed across scenarios.
This approach allowed Fluvius to move beyond identifying issues in a single forecast. Instead, planners could identify assets and regions that would be constrained across the vast majority of futures to inform no-regret investments that need to be prioritized (e.g. the same assets were overloaded in more than 140 of the 150 simulated scenarios).
Beyond traditional wires solutions, ElectrifiedGrid™ also enabled Fluvius to dynamically assess wires and non-wires alternatives, allowing investment strategies to evolve as techno-economic and policy inputs change.
Fluvius shared these insights directly with the regulator, using ElectrifiedGrid™ to clearly demonstrate why these investments were necessary and where they should be targeted. This alignment helped build confidence in the proposed investments and supported regulatory approval for rate case applications.
The Result
For the 2024-2033 regulatory period, in addition to the €7 billion base investment plan originally approved by the regulator, ElectrifiedGrid™ supported the approval of an additional €4 billion in no-regret investments, justified through transparent, scenario-based analysis.
Further, Fluvius estimates that, compared to traditional planning approaches, the use of ElectrifiedGrid™ helped avoid approximately €2 billion in capital investment by enabling far more precise targeting of upgrades and interventions.
Beyond financial outcomes, the digital twin approach materially improved Fluvius’ data quality. By identifying incorrect switching states, topology gaps, and GIS inconsistencies, ElectrifiedGrid™ helped increase the quality of Fluvius’ network model from roughly 60 percent to over 90 percent correctly connected circuits.
Today, Fluvius is equipped with a dynamic planning capability that allows it to continuously reassess grid impacts as electrification accelerates, policies evolve, and new inputs becomes available - ensuring the Flemish grid remains reliable, affordable, and resilient.