A Meta-Level Framework for Evaluating Resilience in Net-Zero Carbon Power Systems with Extreme Weather Events in the United States

Abstract

Important changes are underway in the U.S. power industry in the way that electricity is sourced, transported, and utilized. Disruption from extreme weather events and cybersecurity events is bringing new scrutiny to power-system resilience. Recognizing the complex social and technical aspects that are involved, this article provides a meta-level framework for coherently evaluating and making decisions about power-system resilience. It does so by examining net-zero carbon strategies with quantitative, qualitative, and integrative dimensions across discrete location-specific systems and timescales. The generalizable framework is designed with a flexibility and logic that allows for refinement to accompany stakeholder review processes and highly localized decision-making. To highlight the framework’s applicability across multiple timescales, processes, and types of knowledge, power system outages are reviewed for extreme weather events, including 2021 and 2011 winter storms that impacted Texas, the 2017 Hurricane Maria that affected Puerto Rico, and a heatwave/wildfire event in California in August 2020. By design, the meta-level framework enables utility decision-makers, regulators, insurers, and communities to analyze and track levels of resilience safeguards for a given system. Future directions to advance an integrated science of resilience in net-zero power systems and the use of this framework are also discussed.

Climate-aware decision-making: lessons for electric grid infrastructure planning and operations

“…We encountered relatively few papers that explicitly consider multi-stakeholder engagement. In some cases, authors consider assumptions about risk tolerance or other decision-maker preferences (Szolgayová et al 2012, Ji et al 2017, 2020a, or formulate solutions to be decision-relevant (Burillo et Other authors have considered stakeholder involvement theoretically, such as by developing frameworks for engagement (Araújo and Shropshire 2021), simulating preferences via agent-based models (Hoekstra et al 2017, Teixeira et al 2018, Hanna and Gross 2021, or evaluating computational approaches capable of accounting for various perspectives by solving for multiple objectives and/or including appropriate uncertainty ranges on parameters (Heinrich et al 2007). Authors have also proposed that stakeholder engagement can be used to determine where to focus within a solution space once a set of solutions are obtained, and, as each individual view is necessarily a simplification of all considerations, to provide a check on other perspectives by helping ensure that a planning exercise accounts for needed nuances (Bollinger et al 2014, Nierop 2014.…”

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“…The EMA initiative developed a meta-level framework for evaluating resilience (Araújo and Shropshire 2021). The framework is used to evaluate future energy systems resilience by drawing from what is known about a system's resilience and the remaining gaps of understanding.…”

“…The process of engagement is used to identify key stakeholders and decision makers, assess needs and concerns, and formulate effective future energy strategies. If done well, this can strengthen knowledge and inform decisions, build legitimacy, and enable more enduring solutions (Araújo and Shropshire, 2021;Araújo 2017).…”

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