Extreme Weather and Natural Hazard Impacts to Grid Operations: A Focus On Utility-Scale Solar

Energy generation is continuing to diversify, posing unique challenges to ongoing grid operations and resilience planning. For example, with the increasing reliance on renewable energy generation, more questions are being raised about the vulnerability of these assets to natural hazards and extreme weather events, especially given the increasing frequency of the latter. This talk will focus on photovoltaics (PV), which contributes 5% of total electricity generation in the United States in 2022 with five states getting at least 17% from it [1]. However, our understanding of PV operations across different large area natural hazards as it impacts grid operations and resilience is relatively limited. This is in part due to a scalar mismatch between PV- and grid-specific information. This talk will present how information for specific hazards (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, and blizzards) is being fused with available energy infrastructure data (e.g., installed solar capacity and grid outage records) to develop scenarios for resilience evaluations. Specifically, we generate two spatially and temporally-resolved parameters (e.g., forced outage rates and mean time to recover) that are used as an input to a probabilistic resource adequacy model to generate relevant findings across balancing authority regions of the United States. Such techniques that combine information from natural hazards and extreme weather events with energy generator specific behaviors will become increasingly important to help inform grid operations and resilience activities, such as emergency preparedness activities.

[1] D. Feldman, K. Dummit, J. Zuboy, and R. Margolis. (2023). Spring 2023 Solar Industry Update. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/86215.pdf