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Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) have caused extensive power outages. The impacts of TC-caused blackouts may worsen in the future as TCs and heatwaves intensify. Here we couple TC and heatwave projections and power outage and recovery process analysis to investigate how TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard risk may vary in a changing climate, with Harris County, Texas as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario RCP8.5, long-duration heatwaves following strong TCs may increase sharply. The expected percentage of Harris residents experiencing at least one longer-than-5-day TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard in a 20-year period could increase dramatically by a factor of 23 (from 0.8% to 18.2%) over the 21 st century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the power distribution network can significantly mitigate the compound hazard risk. Thus, climate adaptation actions, such as strategically undergrounding distribution network and developing distributed energy sources, are urgently needed to improve coastal power system resilience.
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North American Blackout Time Series Statistics and Implications for Blackout Risk
We use North American Electric Reliability Corporation historical data to give improved estimates of distributions of blackout size, time correlations, and waiting times for the Eastern and Western interconnections of the North American grid. We then explain and estimate the implications of the power law region (heavy tails) in the empirical distribution of blackout size in the historical data for the Western interconnection. Annual mean blackout size has high variability and the risk of large blackouts exceeds the risk of medium size blackouts. Ways to communicate blackout risk are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1135825
- PAR ID:
- 10519682
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0885-8950
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4406 to 4414
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2015.2510627
