Planning for the Future in a Changing Climate

NYPA  is investing nearly $1 million in this effort to quantify the potential climate impacts across the region, and then to assess how those changes in climate could impact its infrastructure and investments. The goal is to strengthen resilience against all potential climate hazards, including major weather events.

NYPA operates 16 power generating facilities and maintains more than 1,400 miles of power lines in New York. More than 80 percent of the electricity produced comes from hydropower, so NYPA is particularly interested in how changes in climate may impact its ability to generate power throughout the year. Variations in the amount of rain, and when that rain falls, can impact the water flows through its dams, while storms and heavy winds can damage power lines. Climate change could also affect electricity demand, as customers change their patterns of electricity use for heating and air conditioning due to extreme temperatures.

Argonne says it is a world leader in creating hyperlocal climate model simulation datasets and has the most detailed climate projections available in the U.S. Argonne’s approach uses historical climate data and some of the world’s best climate models to project future climate in a very localized area — down to the size of a neighborhood — up to 50 years in the future.

While most climate models can only look at changes over a large area — typically 100 square kilometers — Argonne’s models can assess climate risks at the scale needed for businesses to understand how specific buildings and equipment could be damaged by flooding or high winds. This model is so computationally intense, it would take over 3,000 years to run the calculations on a standard laptop. On the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) Theta supercomputer, the process takes hours.

For this project, scientists at Argonne will be using this high-resolution climate model with their infrastructure models to provide NYPA with the best possible projections of how weather and climate will change in the future, and the consequences this will have on their infrastructure. Through this combined modeling effort, Argonne scientists and engineers will not only assess the exposure of NYPA’s infrastructure to climate impacts, but also the sensitivity of the equipment and facilities that make up NYPA’s operating systems to these projected changes. By identifying and quantifying these climate impacts to NYPA’s infrastructure today, the team will be able to develop a plan to proactively mitigate climate risks, and better ensure that NYPA is able to reliably deliver power and transmit it across the varied regions of New York in the future.

“Argonne has this unique combination of skill sets and climate data that no one else has,” said Rudyard Sadleir, a technology portfolio manager at Argonne helping connect scientists to industry partners like NYPA who are interested in climate resilience. ​We can take that climate data and help NYPA identify the strengths and weaknesses in the system, then take the next step to actually provide solutions. Not only will we be able to develop scenarios to show NYPA how the climate will impact its infrastructure and business model now and in the future, but we will also be able to pair it with our expertise in the infrastructure of an electric grid and the interdependencies of the system.”

I am excited about taking national laboratory capabilities and bringing them directly to a utility company,” said Kyle Pfeiffer, the director of the National Preparedness Analytics Center at Argonne.

Pfeiffer emphasized the need for organizations like Argonne to translate the cutting-edge science in climate and infrastructure modeling into what that actually means for industry and people. ​Argonne is going to be able to give NYPA information that will affect how they think about their risk management and their infrastructure investment for decades to come.”

“This is just one of the ways Argonne is helping companies and other entities in the U.S. prepare for a climate-resilient future,” Argonne says, adding that organizations interested in working with Argonne as part of their climate resilience efforts should contact .