POWER-GRID RESILIENCEScience and Supercomputers Help Utilities Adapt to Climate Change

Northern Illinois traditionally enjoys four predictable seasons. The winters are notoriously cold and the summers just hot enough to make winter worthwhile. The “shoulder” seasons (spring and fall) predictably and evenly shift in and out of the other two seasons.

However, that climate is changing, with big repercussions for the people who live in the region and the power grid that supports them.

ComEd, the energy company that provides electricity to 9 million people across Northern Illinois, 70% of the state’s population, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science (CCRDS) released a new report that shows northern Illinois at mid-century will be warmer and more humid overall, with longer shoulder and growing seasons.

The report —  “ComEd Climate Risk and Adaptation Outlook, Phase 1: Temperature, Heat Index, and Average Wind” — is CCRDS’s first publicly available issue. It presents the most up-to-date understanding of how climate change may affect ComEd’s distribution grid and highlights the need for strategies that adapt to future climate conditions.

The CCRDS is a national center located at Argonne that uses cutting-edge scientific resources to provide information that will help communities identify vulnerabilities and plan for resilience to the impacts of climate change. Key resources include Argonne’s Visualization Lab, Studio for Augmented Collaboration and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility.

Authors of the study analyzed temperature, heat index and average wind over a historical (1995-2004) and a mid-century (2045-2054) time period to evaluate future climate impacts for the region. They studied how climate change may affect ComEd’s energy demand and created a map that shows other areas of the country where the present-day climate looks similar to northern Illinois’ projected future climate.

“Weather more typical of Saint Louis or Louisville will be more common in northern Illinois by mid-century,” said Jordan Branham, a senior climate risk and resilience analyst in Argonne’s Decision and Infrastructure Sciences division who helped draft the report. “Days when the average temperature exceeds 93- or 94-degrees Fahrenheit will be a more annual occurrence, and higher nighttime temperatures will offer less relief during a heat wave. This could result in lots of air conditioners running at high speed simultaneously, which could stress and overtax the power grid.”