Climate-aware decision-making: lessons for electric grid infrastructure planning and operations

Abstract

Climate change poses significant risks to large-scale infrastructure systems and brings considerable uncertainties that challenge historical planning approaches. Here we focus on how climate awareness might be better incorporated into planning and decision-making in the electric power sector. To do so, we consider lessons from decision science literature where researchers have specifically focused on how to make better decisions under uncertainty. We perform a three-part review: of decision science literature on best practices for decision-making under uncertainty, of industry practice documents to understand how new uncertainties may affect the types of decisions electric utilities are making today, and of literature on electricity sector planning under climate change to assess how lessons from decision science might fit into sector-specific analyses. We discuss how characterizations of uncertainty from the decision science literature might guide approaches in the electricity sector to appropriately capture climate-related uncertainties. We also distill three key ideas from the decision science literature that can be incorporated into electricity sector planning to manage these new uncertainties: robustness, adaptive planning, and multi-stakeholder engagement. We offer example recommendations for how these key ideas might be incorporated into one essential type of planning activity, capacity expansion.

Leveraging rail-based mobile energy storage to increase grid reliability in the face of climate uncertainty

“…Equation (3) describes the freight delivery costs of RMES, where U p is the AEF per region, n is the number of regions utilizing the RMES resource (we assume 2 for this analysis), R f is the freight delivery rate and d is distance between regions. We estimate the freight delivery rate at US$0.03 (t km) −1 (ref.…”

“…As the economy decarbonizes amid more frequent extreme weather events, the electric grid must simultaneously deploy zero-carbon generating resources, maintain reliability and become more resilient to major disruptions. Though electric reliability-the ability to maintain power delivery to customers in the face of routine uncertainty in normal operating conditions 1 -has long been a challenge, heightened supply uncertainty from renewable generation 2 and fundamental changes in electricity demand add considerable complexity 3,4 . Further, climate-driven weather extremes challenge the grid's resilience 5 or its ability to absorb, adapt to and recover from low-probability, high-impact disruptions 6 .…”

Adapting to climate change: substitution effect of water on residential electricity consumption

“…This indicates that climate change significantly stimulates residential electricity consumption in hot weather, consistent with Zhang et al (2021a, 2021b) and Zhang et al (2022a, 2022b). Climate change has threatened the reliability of the electric power system (Brockway et al , 2022). Extreme weather has become more frequent, and temperature levels have increased, leading to explosive electricity consumption growth (Zhang et al , 2021a, 2021b).…”

Identifying Robust Decarbonization Pathways for the Western U.S. Electric Power System under Deep Climate Uncertainty

“…In the near-term (prior to 2050), inter-annual (or internal) climate variability, which is driven by the dynamics of the climate system and sensitive to initial conditions [35][36][37][38], is the primary source of climate-related uncertainty [37,39] (as opposed to model or emissions scenario uncertainty [40]). Inter-annual variability superimposed on a non-stationary background climate and emission trajectory leads to deep uncertainty on climate impacts [41]. Under deep uncertainty, methods instead focused on identifying robust strategies or alternatives are better suited to informing decisions [34].…”