Power System Resilience against natural disasters

Extreme events, primarily natural disasters and climate-driven severe weather, have caused extensive damages in power systems, leaving millions of customers without electricity for several hours. Such events include wildfires in Australia, the Americas, and South Europe; flooding events in the UK, Italy and Spain; storms in the Americas; and earthquakes in Pacific Ring, etc. Handling with their sequences requires revisiting the current, traditional reliability frameworks in power system design and operation. Historically, power system planners, regulators, and policymakers have not accounted for such events in network reliability standards. Instead, the design and operation of electric power infrastructure have centered on so-called credible (or “average”) outages, such as single or double faults, commonly referred to in power system terminology as N-1 or N-2 contingencies. While these approaches have ensured continuity of supply during minor, everyday disruptions, they fall short in addressing the challenges posed by extreme events that cause disruptions far beyond the scope of N-1 or N-2 outages.