In the face of climate change, the electric power system is experiencing a renewed focus on resilience and adaptation to physical climate risk. Resilience—defined as the ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from potentially disruptive events—differs from power system reliability by explicitly including extreme events that are sufficiently rare, cause multiple concurrent failures, affect a wide area or large number of customers, and require more complex restoration strategies. Extremes are thus a primary focus of climate-related resilience since changes in extreme events are likely to be more impactful to the power system than changes in average conditions. This Quick Insight, as part of EPRI’s larger Climate 101 training series, discusses two definitions of extreme events that may arise from the use of climate data, namely climatological extremes and power system operating extremes.
Authors Erik Smith, et al.