Read on Twitter
I suspect a lot of utilities, regulators, & policymakers are asking themselves: is our power system prepared for climate change? Below, a short thread with suggested analyses and action items in prioritized order. Would love to hear other's thoughts.
1. What is your planning horizon? Are your IRPs, reliability analyses, capacity markets, etc looking out far enough ahead to ensure that investments now will fare well in 10, 20, 30 years?
2. Are you using prospective datasets? We have exited a stationary world, which means using historic data is not good enough. HighResMIP & ScenarioMIP are new datasets with useful data. Analog approaches could also work. Don't sweat the RCPs - they are similar through midcentury.
[Of course, historic data are still useful. Lots of extreme weather events are available in 40+ years of reanalysis data. And some of these "new" events are not necessarily new. Exhibit A: https://twitter.com/kidstatic/status/1361914812305985538?s=20]
3. Are you capturing the interaction between your climate mitigation and adaptation activities? Think of what TX would look like now if all heating was electrified, a point others have made. Our paper found significant overlap in mit & adap. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.0c06547
4. Have you broadened your scope to consider compound events? There is a great emerging lit on this in the climate space. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-0060-z . A great ex: fires in CA reducing PV generation by 20%! Again: 20%! Likely concurrent heat-driven impacts. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45336
5. Is your market design compatible with long-term needs under clim change? Better experts on markets than me ( @jacob_mays for one). But does climate change require a coordinated planning response, rather than letting individ utilities use different CC projects in an E only mkt?
6. Are you harnessing climate-resilient flexibility? Storage could have helped in TX, but we would have needed a lot. Same for electrified heating DR. Gas plants are often relied on for flexibility, but this (& other events) underscore the peril of this thinking.
Finally, just to get a sense for relative impacts of climate change: changes in demand >>> changes in hydropower & thermal > changes in wind and solar. Demand will change seasonally ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-019-02413-w) & have much higher peaks ( https://static1.squarespace.com/static/591f304fa5790aa5cc8df828/t/59b9a127e975f52a45451f05/1505337642289/abh.pdf).
Electrified heating will again play a large role here (an expert: @parth_PIT ). Let's also not forget that thermal forced outage rates are HIGHLY temperature dependent ( https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1016%2Fj.apenergy.2019.113513).
Lastly, I'll be teaching a session on this topic @ the IPU Power Grid School in April: https://ipu.msu.edu/grid @michiganstateu .
Really lastly: 1. the speed of research needed in this case really makes me despair inside the ivory tower. And 2. @JesseJenkins great quant stuff this week, thanks.
