GRID SECURITYIs the Electrical Grid Prepared for Climate Change?

Summer heat waves across the country tested whether America’s aging electrical grid can keep up with demand—a problem scientists say will be exacerbated by climate change, as severe hurricanes, wildfires and other weather events occur more frequently, disrupting electricity generation and transmission.

Meeting the growing electricity needs of American consumers requires greater generation and transmission capacity, increased resiliency and smarter management.

The DU Newsroom asked Amin Khodaei, director of KLab and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Denver’s Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, how new technologies, smart grids and active consumers can prepare the grid for climate change.

What challenges does climate change pose to our current electrical grid?
Safety, leisure, work, and now more than ever, education heavily depend on a power grid that can supply and provide electricity without interruption. However, climate-change-induced extreme weather events and natural disasters are disrupting the grid and posing multiple challenges to its operation.

The electric power grid has been traditionally designed with two objectives in mind: reliability and economics. Reliability represents the grid’s ability to continue electricity supply and delivery in case of limited equipment outages—for example, if one or two transmission lines are out of service. The grid’s economic objective represents selecting the lowest-cost generation mix to produce electricity considering the physical and technical limitations of the grid and various generation units. Electric utilities have been successful for the most part in achieving these two objectives over the past century. However, the growing frequency and intensity of climate-induced disasters necessitate considering another equally important objective: resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a power grid and its components to withstand and adapt to disruptive events and rapidly recover from them. Achieving resilience is expensive, and the increasing number of disasters only make it worse.

How can the current grid be adapted or upgraded to ensure resilient and reliable electricity?
There are three factors driving future grid needs and challenges. The first two are climate change and the changing energy supply landscape that I talked about. The third is around consumers. The way that consumers are using electricity is changing. There is a growing need for higher quality power for consumers’ digital devices. Consumers are also installing more and more local generation, including rooftop solar panels and residential energy storage systems, causing a two-way flow of electricity for the first time ever, from customers to the upstream grid. The growing use