Compound Hazards and the Power Sector in a Changing Climate

Compound climate hazards, or the combination of two or more climate drivers or phenomena (e.g., heat waves, droughts, extreme rainfall events), are becoming more common under climate change and have the potential to create even greater impacts than what would be expected from individual climate extremes (IPCC, 2021). These types of events can produce a wide range of damaging impacts on the power system, ranging from direct physical impacts to energy shortages.

EPRI’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation Initiative (Climate READi) has developed this white paper to serve as a resource to highlight the importance of compound hazards to the power sector. Adequately assessing the impact of compound hazards on the power system involves two crucial exercises:

1. Characterizing compound hazards from a climate perspective. This entails identifying the combinations of climate variables or events most relevant to the power sector, assessing both historical and forward-looking data for trends in these types of events, and developing power system analysis-ready compound climate hazard data inputs.
2. Translating information on compound hazards into power system vulnerabilities (i.e., outage probabilities, fragility curves, etc.) that can be incorporated into risk modeling and analysis tools.

This white paper provides background on the types of compound hazards and identifies categories of compound hazards directly relevant to the power sector. Then, this paper reviews approaches and methodologies commonly used to study compound hazards in the literature and explores how compound hazards are currently accounted for in power system planning. Overall, Climate READi highlights three main areas where power system operators would benefit the most from future research: 1) improvements in the characterization of compound hazards relevant to the power sector, 2) in-depth studies of impacts of compound hazards on power system components or the system as a whole, and 3) work on how the power sector can increase resilience to compound hazards.