The disaster resilience value of shared rooftop solar systems in residential communities

Abstract

Distributed energy resources can enhance community resilience to power outages in the aftermath of natural disasters. This article presents a method to quantify the resilience value that rooftop solar systems can provide to residential neighborhoods. Homes are grouped into geographical clusters to simulate the effect of sharing energy when a disaster disables the electric grid and damages some of the homes. Historical energy consumption and solar irradiance data are used to estimate the likelihood that each cluster could meet its own energy needs, given a defined level and pattern of rooftop solar adoption. As a case study, the method is applied to single-family homes in San Carlos, California, subjected to a disaster scenario representing the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The case study shows how higher rooftop solar adoption levels increase postearthquake power accessibility during different seasons of the year. It also demonstrates that policy intervention can ensure more geographically uniform solar adoption and, therefore, more even resilience. Finally, the article evaluates the effect and cost of such an intervention, finding that a modest subsidy can make a notable difference in evening out resilience across a community.

Bayesian updating of solar panel fragility curves and implications of higher panel strength for solar generation resilience

“…Access to energy is also pivotal to sustaining emergency response operations for critical infrastructure such as hospitals or fire stations. Communities can further utilize locally generated energy through energy sharing and microgrids to increase households' access to power after a disaster, even for those who did not install panels (Ceferino et al, 2020;Patel et al, 2021). Nevertheless, solar panels will not replace the need for backup generation units for resilience, especially for critical facilities, and fully charged behind-the-meter batteries must complement them for power access during an emergency response.…”

Stochastic Modeling of Solar Generation During Hurricanes

“…Households with rooftop solar panels still rely on the vulnerable main grid if their inverters are placed in the grid and not at their homes. When households or commercial buildings adopt a combination of solar panels and storage units, inverters are placed at within the buildings, outside the main grid; thus, consumers acquire independence from the grid and can work on island mode when the grid is out (Cook et al, 2020;Patel et al, 2021). Yet, as discussed previously, the reduced generation during the first four days after the hurricane will force reduced consumption.…”

“…Accordingly, a new formulation for modeling solar generation during natural hazards is needed to account for the rapid adoption of solar. Only a recent investigation has proposed a framework based on risk analysis to quantify the resilience of modern power systems with rooftop solar panels, but exclusively for earthquake hazards (Patel et al, 2021;Ceferino et al, 2020). As hurricanes pose an enormous threat to urban centers worldwide, this paper applies risk analysis to investigate solar generation during tropical cyclones.…”

“…It can be integrated with existing grid models to support key applications for power resilience. For example, our proposed formulation can be combined with power network formulations to assess balances between power demand and supply either in decentralized (Leite Da Silva et al, 2012;Al-Muhaini and Heydt, 2013;Patel et al, 2021) or in centralized grids that have utility-scale solar installations (Winkler et al, 2010;González et al, 2016). Further, it can also be used to support cost-benefit assessments of grid hardening and climate policies for grid resilience (Bennett et al, 2021).…”

New conditional, scenario-based, and traditional peak ground velocity models for interface and intraslab subduction zone earthquakes

“…Sucuoğlu et al (1998) found that the ratio of PGA to PGV , which is a proxy for the frequency content of a ground motion (Tso et al, 1992), was the dominating factor for the damage assessment of intermediate-period structures. More recently, Ceferino et al (2020) and Patel et al (2021) used PGV -based fragility functions to conduct regional seismic risk assessment of building portfolio in California. PGV has also been widely used in the seismic analysis of buried pipelines due to its high correlation with the peak horizontal strain in a soil deposit (Newmark, 1967; Newmark and Rosenblueth, 1971; St John and Zahrah, 1987).…”