Climate change, hurricane risk to energy systems, and implications for the new energy economy

This talk will provide an overview of recent research on modeling the impacts of hurricanes on electric power systems and how this may change in a changing climate. The work utilizes past electric power system performance data from the central Gulf Coast region together with engineering, geographic, and climatic and a hurricane wind speed model to estimate the number and spatial extent of power outages, power system damage, and power outage durations. This is done on the basis of a new hybrid data mining/semi-parametric regression model. This talk focuses on the influence of the climate and wind speed data and highlights the implications of the models for the design of future energy systems in coastal areas.