APS, Duke, other utilities pursue new climate resilience strategies as some await upcoming tools
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Utilities like APS, Duke, and others are advancing climate resilience strategies, with efforts focused on system hardening, real-time situational awareness, and improved restoration times post-storms. Enhanced data analytics and granular weather data help target risk areas, while stronger engineering standards and building codes harden infrastructure, showcasing the need for tailored resilience planning across varied regional risks.
APS and Duke, along with PacifiCorp, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and Puget Sound Energy, see different paths to reach resilience planning’s potential while awaiting EPRI metrics.
Hurricane Beryl’s “over a million customer outages” showed “there is plenty of need for the resiliency hardening investments that utilities such as CenterPoint have proposed,” Wei Du, a PA Consulting energy and utilities expert and former senior analyst and engineer for New York City’s Con Edison, told the New York Times after the event.
Though no two utilities face identical risks, assessment frameworks help utilities understand “the specific sets of risks they must mitigate,” said PA Consulting’s Wei Du. “Data analytics of the risks of different events, like storms and wildfires, and how to mitigate them, follow the same frameworks,” he added.
Specific planning mitigations include system hardening and technologies to bring situational awareness closer to real time, Wei said. Planning can also include proactively obtaining more and more granular local meteorology data to know what impacts might occur where and strengthening engineering standards and building codes to harden infrastructure, he added.
Utilities need to improve “restoration performance as demonstrated in the storm restoration curve,” Wei continued. The steeper the slope of the curve, the more people are restored in less time, and the more effective the utility’s restoration preparations were, he said.
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