From Reliability to Resilience: Planning the Grid Against the Extremes
Power & Energy Society
Dr. Rodrigo Moreno, Asst. Professor and Research Associate, University of Chile and Imperial College London
Although extreme events – mainly natural disasters and climate change-driven severe weather – are the result of naturally occurring processes, power systems planners, regulators and policy makers do not usually recognize them within network reliability standards. Instead, planners have historically designed the electric power infrastructure accounting for the so-called credible (or “average”) outages that usually represent single or (some kind of) simultaneous faults (e.g., faults on double circuits). A reliable power system would be operated in a secure way if it were able to withstand these faults without threatening the integrity of system operation and preserving continuity of supply to customers. However, the impact of recent extreme events on power systems, e.g., bushfires in Australia, flooding events in the UK, storms in the Americas, and earthquakes in countries located at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, which have even led to chaotic societal situations, goes far beyond N-1 or N-2 outages and clearly highlight the need for rethinking current planning practices. In this context, in this presentation we analyze a set of key questions: How can we incorporate resilience-thinking into power system planning, going beyond traditional reliability-driven planning? Can negative impacts of natural hazards on electricity supply be mitigated through planning measures? What is the optimum portfolio of measures for boosting power grid resilience to such extreme events? How can we build a power grid that is both robust and flexible enough to withstand events that have possibly never been experienced before?
Dr. Rodrigo Moreno, Asst. Professor and Research Associate, University of Chile and Imperial College London
Dr. Moreno is with the University of Chile and Imperial College London. He is also a Lead Investigator of the Energy Group in the Complex Engineering Systems Institute (ISCI). His research focuses on development of new concepts and models in energy grids to make
electricity supply more sustainable, resilient, reliable and affordable through the application of advanced stochastic, robust and distributionally robust optimization and simulation models. Particularly, his work on network reliability and resilience has been the recipient of an international Newton Prize, awarded by the British Government in 2018 in recognition
for excellent research and innovation. He is an Editor of the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy, and the Vice-Chair of the Natural Disaster Mitigation Methods and Operation Technology Working Group of IEEE PES.
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For any questions regarding this presentation or any IEEE PES Boston Technical Meetings, please contact: Risa (781-227-7999, risa.karanxha@nationalgrid.com)