Electric utilities are experiencing an increase in the number and intensity of extreme flooding and impacts on operations and physical assets. Most electricity infrastructure is built to withstand past or current flood related hazards. Due to long lifetimes, electricity systems are likely to be exposed more frequently to more extreme flooding than those for which they were designed and may not operate as intended under those conditions. Additionally, investors are increasingly analyzing the physical climate risk of their portfolio of investments. For these reasons and others, electric utilities may be considering their physical climate risk from flooding now and in the future. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood zone maps have been a ‘standard’ flood risk assessment data source, but have been shown to underestimate flood risk by not accounting for current and future environmental changes. Newer open source and proprietary models, tools, and services to assess flood risk have emerged, but how do electric utilities evaluate them?
This research identifies important criteria for evaluating flood risk assessment products, provides an overview of fourteen flood risk products, evaluates the fourteen flood risk products based on the evaluation criteria, and applies a subset of selected products to two case study locations (central Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna River; and coastal Texas, near Houston) followed by a synthesis and comparison of the results of the case study to industry-standard FEMA flood maps.
Flood risk models can be challenging to understand for those not versed in coastal, fluvial, and pluvial flood modeling. This report provides a review by subject matter experts that can be used as a resource for electric utility staff considering flood models, tools, and services.
Authors Erik Smith and Shailee Desai