Page 6 - Issue 2 2023

INDUSTRY NEWS

Weather and climate risks to electricity

networks must be monitored

Information from the Institute for Environmental Analytics

xtreme weather events are causing greater uncertainty to concept to ensure that the system can be tuned to monitor the
infrastructure owners and operators. Physical damage to right weather variables.
Eassets as well as disruption to services and field operations At the same time, the modelling team analysed a range of
lead to higher O&M costs and potential penalties for regulated climate projection models to develop an initial understanding
utilities. On top of this, climate change makes it more uncertain of how different scenarios might impact on the frequency and
how weather patterns will impact networks over the longer term. potential durations of specific weather events compared to the
To help manage this challenge, the Institute for present day. This informed thinking around planning for future
Environmental Analytics worked with a range of transmission O&M activity as well as shaping the recommended mitigation
and distribution grid operators to develop a proof-of-concept actions that could be built into a future operational system.
software platform to provide a new, enhanced capability for
operators to understand, monitor and mitigate weather-related Solution
risks to their networks more effectively. The project also The final output of the project was a proof-of-concept software
demonstrated the benefit of integrating climate projections into platform demonstrating the potential for the system, highlighting
the assessment by showing how risk profiles may evolve in the how real time alerts could sit alongside network data and risk
face of ongoing climate change. maps.
The project ran for over nine months with funding provided
by the UK Space Agency. The partners were Barbados Light & Impact
Power, ISA Group, Grupo EPM, Northern Power Grid, Western The proof-of-concept and data insight coming out of the
Power Distribution, and the Energy Systems Catapult. project successfully demonstrated the potential benefits for the
system to improve O&M operations as well as providing greater
Process infrastructure resilience through enhanced long-term climate
Through a series of workshops, the data team analysed the planning.
current challenges faced by the partners and undertook a data
mining exercise to look for patterns between faults and weather The Institute for Environmental Analytics, based at the University
disruption across the different networks. Part of this exercise was of Reading, UK, was established in 2015. It is a commercial R&D
to understand the ‘fragilities’ for different asset classes – a key organisation focusing on applied weather and climate modelling.

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