The electric power industry is shifting its generating portfolio towards variable energy resources and natural gas. As these changes are occurring, the industry needs to plan for resource adequacy that will make electric service more resilient to significant disruptions of supply whether they are the result of weather, cyber / physically attacks, fuel constraints or multi-factor events. Across each of these topics the power industry today employs planning methods that tend to understate the probability of supply disruptions affecting multiple units and their impact on consumers and the system itself.
This white paper focuses on planning for resource adequacy given a world in which supply disruptions are correlated and no longer limited to the outage of independent units and may be due to widespread or long-duration events with significant economic impacts on consumers. The paper highlights the following attributes of planning for resource adequacy in an environment of increasing numbers of extreme events:
- Supply disruptions that are common mode events caused by weather, cyber / physical attacks, natural gas constraints or combinations of factors.
- The occurrence of an event (zero/one), consideration of its physical impacts (the amount of unserved energy, breadth of customer base impacted, and duration) and its economic costs to consumers.
- The need for the definition of probabilistic metrics and methodologies that over time can be used to incorporate consideration of common mode and high impact supply disruptions.
The paper concludes with an identification of strategies that an individual utility and/or an ISO/RTO could follow based on its unique situation.
Authors Vikas Singhvi et al