Electric Power Infrastructure Vulnerabilities to Heat Waves from Climate Change

abstract: Electricity infrastructure vulnerabilities were assessed for future heat waves due to climate change. Critical processes and component relationships were identified and characterized with consideration for the terminal event of service outages, including cascading failures in transmission-level components that can result in blackouts. The most critical dependency identified was the increase in peak electricity demand with higher air temperatures. Historical and future air temperatures were characterized within and across Los Angeles County, California (LAC) and Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona. LAC was identified as more vulnerable to heat waves than Phoenix due to a wider distribution of historical temperatures. Two approaches were developed to estimate peak demand based on air temperatures, a top-down statistical model and bottom-up spatial building energy model. Both approaches yielded similar results, in that peak demand should increase sub-linearly at temperatures above 40°C (104 °F) due to saturation in the coincidence of air conditioning (AC) duty cycles. Spatial projections for peak demand were developed for LAC to 2060 considering potential changes in population, building type, building efficiency, AC penetration, appliance efficiency, and air temperatures due climate change. These projections were spatially allocated to delivery system components (generation, transmission lines, and substations) to consider their vulnerability in terms of thermal de-rated capacity and weather adjusted load factor (load divided by capacity). Peak hour electricity demand was projected to increase in residential and commercial sectors by 0.2–6.5 GW (2–51%) by 2060. All grid components, except those near Santa Monica Beach, were projected to experience 2–20% capacity loss due to air temperatures exceeding 40 °C (104 °F). Based on scenario projections, and substation load factors for Southern California Edison (SCE), SCE will require 848—6,724 MW (4-32%) of additional substation capacity or peak shaving in its LAC service territories by 2060 to meet additional demand associated with population growth projections.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

Emergency Decision Making and Disaster Recovery

There is growing evidence that the number and severity of natural disasters and their cascading events such as power blackouts are increasing. These extreme events threaten human lives, displace hundreds of thousands of people and cause huge financial losses. Therefore, it is important to understand better how socio-economic systems can best respond to these disasters and how they can recover quickly, build back better and become more resilient. This thesis comprises five separate studies of four different types of disasters. The overall objective is to improve the understanding of how society copes with and makes decisions in crisis and emergency situations, and how disaster affected areas recover, particularly in terms of speed and quality. This is a huge subject and rather than focusing on just one event or a single type of disaster, the objective is to look at different types of disaster events by studying people’s risk perception and their (real or expected) disaster behaviour in the context of different phases of the disaster cycle from immediate response to longer-term recovery and resilience building. The five studies featured in this thesis are: 1. Behaviour during a long-lasting blackout in France and Germany, investigated through role-playing scenario exercises to study how society would cope. The aim is provide information to emergency managers and policy makers about community needs and people’s likely behaviour in future blackouts, 2. Analyses of people’s preparedness, perception and behaviour during floods in the UK and Germany and their attitude to public authorities, investigated through face-to-face interview surveys with people living and working in the flood prone areas, 3. Analyses of flood evacuation compliance, from both decision-theoretic and game-theoretic perspectives, using the Warning Compliance Model, which incorporates a Bayesian information system that formalizes the statistical effects of a warning forecast based on the harmonious structure of a Hidden Markov Model, 4. Examining recovery after two major comparable floods in UK and Germany in terms of the impacts, levels of preparedness and government response, investigated with face-to-face interview surveys with residents and businesses and online surveys with experts, 5. Tourist destination recovery in the Philippines after earthquake and typhoon, investigated through interviews with tourist managers and stakeholders. The key areas for future research revolve around identifying in more detail and with greater precision those factors that predispose a society to respond effectively to a disaster, to recover as quickly as possible and to build resilience in order to better confront future disasters

A Critical Review of Robustness in Power Grids using Complex Networks Concepts

Complex network theory for analyzing robustness in energy gridsThis paper reviews the most relevant works that have investigated robustness in power grids using Complex Networks (CN) concepts. In this broad field there are two different approaches. The first one is based solely on topological concepts, and uses metrics such as mean path length, clustering coefficient, efficiency and betweenness centrality, among many others. The second, hybrid approach consists of introducing (into the CN framework) some concepts from Electrical Engineering (EE) in the effort of enhancing the topological approach, and uses novel, more efficient electrical metrics such as electrical betweenness, net-ability, and others. There is however a controversy about whether these approaches are able to provide insights into all aspects of real power grids. The CN community argues that the topological approach does not aim to focus on the detailed operation, but to discover the unexpected emergence of collective behavior, while part of the EE community asserts that this leads to an excessive simplification. Beyond this open debate it seems to be no predominant structure (scale-free, small-world) in high-voltage transmission power grids, the vast majority of power grids studied so far. Most of them have in common that they are vulnerable to targeted attacks on the most connected nodes and robust to random failure. In this respect there are only a few works that propose strategies to improve robustness such as intentional islanding, restricted link addition, microgrids and smart grids, for which novel studies suggest that small-world networks seem to be the best topology.This work has been partially supported by the project TIN2014-54583-C2-2-R from the Spanish Ministerial Commission of Science and Technology (MICYT), by the project S2013/ICE-2933 from Comunidad de Madrid and by the project FUTURE GRIDS-2020 from the Basque Government