Modeling the Effects of Winter Storms on Power Infrastructure Systems in the Northern United States
Modeling the Effects of Winter Storms on Power Infrastructure Systems in the Northern United States

Author: Jordan Vick Pino

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Winter storms cause significant damage to the power infrastructure system each year in the United States. These storms leave millions without power for an extended period of time, resulting in substantial economic losses. Utility companies seek to lower restoration costs and better prepare for such events. Therefore, many are investing in decision-support tools such as predictive models. These tools, coupled with industry experience, can aid in pre-storm planning and post-storm restoration activities, thus lowering costs and reducing outage extent and duration. This research developed winter storm impact models for FirstEnergy, an investor-owned utility company headquartered in the Midwestern United States.Specifically, three main objectives were addressed: (1) development and validation of a service territory winter storm impact model for FirstEnergy, (2) development and validation of regionally-defined winter storm impact models for FirstEnergy, and (3) a comparative analysis of the service territory and regionally-defined winter storm impact models.Results from objective 1 revealed that winter storm impact models can be successfully developed and validated using a number of environmental and dynamic covariates. Results also showed that reducing the initial covariate set resulted in similar predictive accuracy as the full model, thus allowing for faster model runtimes and easier maintenance. In addition, it was found that meteorological variables are the most important for predicting winter storm-related damage.Results from objective 2 showed that regional models could be developed with reasonable accuracy. Similar to objective 1, reduced versions of the models performed better in many cases, indicating that a large number of covariates could be removed. In addition, meteorological variables such as ice, snow, and wind parameters were found to be the most influential for predicting winter storm related damage. Lastly, it was found that for most models, medium-scale and large-scale events (i.e. orders > 50) were predicted better than small-scale events.Lastly, objective 3 compared the service territory and regional models using a case study approach. Results showed that for most operating companies, the service territory model performed better. This was likely due to the large sample size when using data from all operating companies. In addition, the varying sizes of each operating company further limited sample size, thus resulting in lower accuracy for regional models. Despite the service territory model performing better in most cases, this comparison did shed light on the importance of regional models, and their future refinement to increase model performance. Expanding the study period could improve regional models. Overall, results showed that the winter storm impact models developed performed well and that the regional models performed better in many circumstances. In addition, these results showed that a large number of covariates can be removed, thus lowering computing time and model maintenance. The results from this research can provide FirstEnergy with a decision-support tool that can be implemented prior to a winter storm event to inform decision makers within the company, thus lowering costs and reducing restoration times.

Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation's Electricity System
Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation's Electricity System

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 0309463076

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Americans' safety, productivity, comfort, and convenience depend on the reliable supply of electric power. The electric power system is a complex "cyber-physical" system composed of a network of millions of components spread out across the continent. These components are owned, operated, and regulated by thousands of different entities. Power system operators work hard to assure safe and reliable service, but large outages occasionally happen. Given the nature of the system, there is simply no way that outages can be completely avoided, no matter how much time and money is devoted to such an effort. The system's reliability and resilience can be improved but never made perfect. Thus, system owners, operators, and regulators must prioritize their investments based on potential benefits. Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation's Electricity System focuses on identifying, developing, and implementing strategies to increase the power system's resilience in the face of events that can cause large-area, long-duration outages: blackouts that extend over multiple service areas and last several days or longer. Resilience is not just about lessening the likelihood that these outages will occur. It is also about limiting the scope and impact of outages when they do occur, restoring power rapidly afterwards, and learning from these experiences to better deal with events in the future.

Climate Impacts on Energy Systems
Climate Impacts on Energy Systems

Author: Jane O. Ebinger

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0821386980

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"While the energy sector is a primary target of efforts to arrest and reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and lower the carbon footprint of development, it is also expected to be increasingly affected by unavoidable climate consequences from the damage already induced in the biosphere. Energy services and resources, as well as seasonal demand, will be increasingly affected by changing trends, increasing variability, greater extremes and large inter-annual variations in climate parameters in some regions. All evidence suggests that adaptation is not an optional add-on but an essential reckoning on par with other business risks. Existing energy infrastructure, new infrastructure and future planning need to consider emerging climate conditions and impacts on design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Integrated risk-based planning processes will be critical to address the climate change impacts and harmonize actions within and across sectors. Also, awareness, knowledge, and capacity impede mainstreaming of climate adaptation into the energy sector. However, the formal knowledge base is still nascent?information needs are complex and to a certain extent regionally and sector specific. This report provides an up-to-date compendium of what is known about weather variability and projected climate trends and their impacts on energy service provision and demand. It discusses emerging practices and tools for managing these impacts and integrating climate considerations into planning processes and operational practices in an environment of uncertainty. It focuses on energy sector adaptation, rather than mitigation which is not discussed in this report. This report draws largely on available scientific and peer-reviewed literature in the public domain and takes the perspective of the developing world to the extent possible."

Review of the Draft Fourth National Climate Assessment
Review of the Draft Fourth National Climate Assessment

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2018-06-18

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0309471699

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Climate change poses many challenges that affect society and the natural world. With these challenges, however, come opportunities to respond. By taking steps to adapt to and mitigate climate change, the risks to society and the impacts of continued climate change can be lessened. The National Climate Assessment, coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is a mandated report intended to inform response decisions. Required to be developed every four years, these reports provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date evaluation of climate change impacts available for the United States, making them a unique and important climate change document. The draft Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) report reviewed here addresses a wide range of topics of high importance to the United States and society more broadly, extending from human health and community well-being, to the built environment, to businesses and economies, to ecosystems and natural resources. This report evaluates the draft NCA4 to determine if it meets the requirements of the federal mandate, whether it provides accurate information grounded in the scientific literature, and whether it effectively communicates climate science, impacts, and responses for general audiences including the public, decision makers, and other stakeholders.

Resilience Modeling of Interdependent Electric Power and Natural Gas Network
Resilience Modeling of Interdependent Electric Power and Natural Gas Network

Author: Wenjing Su

Publisher:

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation develops tools and provides insights for planning interdependent electric power and natural gas system against extreme weather events. More frequent and severe extreme weather events usually leads to geographically correlated component failure and present threats to energy system operation. The dependence between large-scale infrastructure system further complicates the infrastructure planning process. This dissertation addresses the pressing needs for quantitative modeling tools to improve system resilience. It also investigates the impact of network topology of interdependent infrastructure system on system resilience and sheds light on the priority of resilience planning for decision makers. Chapter 2 develop a transmission planning framework for coupled natural gas and electric power systems facing geographically correlated failures. The framework uses a stochastic optimization method incorporating uncertainty in the locations of the geographically correlated failures. We compare the proposed planning framework with the traditional N-k method which plans for geographically uncorrelated failures in terms of improving resilience effectively against geographically correlated failures. The proposed planning framework is illustrated using a small test system, but is scalable to larger system sizes and portable to other coupled-infrastructure contexts. Chapter 3 formulate a steady-state operational model for natural gas and electric transmission system that is capable of considering bidirectional interdependence. The electric transmission system depends on the gas transmission system to provide fuel to power plants for reliable operations. The gas transmission system depends on the electric transmission system to provide power for some compressors, which ensures sufficient gas deliverability. We illustrate our formulation using a gas-grid test system with realistic properties, that is based on the topology of these networks in the northeastern part of the United States. The feasibility of the model formulation is tested with one contingency scenario. Chapter 4 extends the analysis to examine the impact of spatial patterns of interde- pendency points on system reliability and resilience by subjecting this test system to N - 1 transmission failure and geographically correlated failures under different network topologies. We refer the spatial distribution of gas-fired power generation in the power grid as power topology and the spatial distribution of electric compressors in the gas transmission grid as gas topology.

Impact of Climate Risk on the Energy System
Impact of Climate Risk on the Energy System

Author: Amy Myers Jaffe

Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations Press

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9780876097731

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Climate change affects virtually every aspect of the U.S. energy system. As climatic effects such as rising seas and extreme weather continue to appear across many geographies, U.S. energy infrastructure is increasingly at risk. The U.S. Gulf Coast--which is home to 44 percent of total U.S. oil refining capacity and several major ports--is highly vulnerable to flooding events and dangerous ocean surges during severe storms and hurricanes. The link between water availability and energy and electricity production creates another layer of risk to U.S. energy security. Climate risk could manifest not only in physical damages, but also in financial market failures. Climate change-related challenges could impede energy firms' access to capital markets or private insurance markets. Already, climate-related risks have created severe financial problems at a handful of U.S. energy firms, forcing them to interrupt their sales of energy to consumers in particular locations. Over time, climatic disruptions to domestic energy supply could entail huge economic losses and potentially require sizable domestic military mobilizations. The United States is ill prepared for this national security challenge, and public debate about emergency preparedness is virtually nonexistent. To explore the challenges of climate risk to the U.S. energy system and national security, the Council on Foreign Relations organized a two-day workshop in New York, on March 18 and 19, 2019. The gathering of fifty participants included current and former state and federal government officials and regulators, entrepreneurs, scientists, investors, financial- and corporate-sector leaders, credit agencies, insurers, nongovernmental organizations, and energy policy experts. During their deliberations, workshop participants explored how climate-related risks to U.S. energy infrastructure, financial markets, and national security could be measured, managed, and mitigated. Impact of Climate Risk on the Energy System summarizes the insights from this workshop and includes contributions from seven expert authors delving into related topics.

The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate
The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate

Author: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-04-30

Total Pages: 755

ISBN-13: 9781009157971

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for assessing the science related to climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of human-induced climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. This IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate is the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the observed and projected changes to the ocean and cryosphere and their associated impacts and risks, with a focus on resilience, risk management response options, and adaptation measures, considering both their potential and limitations. It brings together knowledge on physical and biogeochemical changes, the interplay with ecosystem changes, and the implications for human communities. It serves policymakers, decision makers, stakeholders, and all interested parties with unbiased, up-to-date, policy-relevant information. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change
Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0309380979

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As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts. Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events. Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.

Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation
Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation

Author: Division on Earth and Life Studies

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2008-07-16

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0309185408

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The Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Division on Earth and Life Studies (DELS) have released the pre-publication version of TRB Special Report 290, The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation, which explores the consequences of climate change for U.S. transportation infrastructure and operations. The report provides an overview of the scientific consensus on the current and future climate changes of particular relevance to U.S. transportation, including the limits of present scientific understanding as to their precise timing, magnitude, and geographic location; identifies potential impacts on U.S. transportation and adaptation options; and offers recommendations for both research and actions that can be taken to prepare for climate change. The book also summarizes previous work on strategies for reducing transportation-related emissions of carbon dioxide--the primary greenhouse gas--that contribute to climate change. Five commissioned papers used by the committee to help develop the report, a summary of the report, and a National Academies press release associated with the report are available online. DELS, like TRB, is a division of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council.