POWER GRIDPlanning for Impacts of Floods and Clouds on Power
On the heels of a Northeastern rainstorm that flooded towns on Long Island and claimed at least two lives in Connecticut, teams of scientists, engineers, and representatives of local power and transportation utilities met to discuss the increasing frequency of severe weather and its impacts on crucial infrastructure.
On the heels of a Northeastern rainstorm that flooded towns on Long Island and claimed at least two lives in Connecticut, teams of scientists, engineers, and representatives of local power and transportation utilities met to discuss the increasing frequency of severe weather and its impacts on crucial infrastructure. The timing for the meeting at New York’s Kennedy International Airport August 21-22, 2024, was a coincidence. But the recent storm set the stage for a series of frank discussions about how power systems and the people and services that depend on them will respond to a changing climate.
The Climate READi Northeast Regional Workshop was co-hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was the final workshop of four hosted around the country by EPRI as part of its Climate REsilience and ADaptation Initiative (Climate READi). After a first day of training sessions on working with climate data, the group convened for presentations and conversations about the impacts of flooding and clouds.
“This workshop is all about the future of the power system in a world affected by climate change,” said Martin Schoonen, Brookhaven Lab’s associate laboratory director for Environment, Biology, Nuclear Science & Nonproliferation, in his welcoming remarks on day two. “The power system underpins many of the systems that support society, such as transportation, healthcare delivery, sewage treatment, and communications.”
Schoonen reminded attendees that while superstorms with devastating impacts may still be relatively rare in the Northeast, heavy rains capable of disrupting services are becoming more frequent.
“Brookhaven’s research in atmospheric and climate science is crucial in understanding the climate system at the fundamental level, but we are also using this knowledge to help utilities in predicting and optimizing restitution after outages associated with local storms,” he said.
Solving problems together
Morgan Scott, director of Climate READi and sustainability and ecosystem stewardship at EPRI, hosted the day’s sessions and encouraged networking to strengthen ties and the potential for collaboration.
“These workshops are a great opportunity to focus on topics that are regionally specific, which is important because the impacts of climate change can be hyperlocal,” she said. “We want to make sure we are thinking about the hazard itself first — what is the science telling us? — and then talk about how the impacts will change. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the scientific community and power system practitioners.”
