Automating natural disaster impact analysis: An open resource to visually estimate a hurricane's impact on the electric grid

Abstract

An ORNL team working on the Energy Awareness and Resiliency Standardized Services (EARSS) project developed a fully automated procedure to take wind speed and location estimates provided by hurricane forecasters and provide a geospatial estimate on the impact to the electric grid in terms of outage areas and projected duration of outages. Hurricane Sandy was one of the worst US storms ever, with reported injuries and deaths, millions of people without power for several days, and billions of dollars in economic impact. Hurricane advisories were released for Sandy from October 22 through 31, 2012. The fact that the geoprocessing was automated was significant-there were 64 advisories for Sandy. Manual analysis typically takes about one hour for each advisory. During a storm event, advisories are released every two to three hours around the clock, and an analyst capable of performing the manual analysis has other tasks they would like to focus on. Initial predictions of a big impact and landfall usually occur three days in advance, so time is of the essence to prepare for utility repair. Automated processing developed at ORNL allowed this analysis to be completed and made publicly available within minutes of each new advisory being released.

On the Impacts of Power Outages during Hurricane Sandy—A Resilience‐Based Analysis

“…Sandy's damage was not restricted to just transformers and power lines, but also to sub stations [Allen, ]. Zone‐3 :This was the most significant period for utility companies, where they had to perform all the restoration work to restore power to their customers. Normally, it would take about 24 hours for the weather system to settle down, and so restoration work would typically begin about 1 day after the storm system passed [Barker et al., ,b]. But the extent of damage with Sandy was so large that the utility companies could not handle the restoration efforts just with their in‐house resources.…”

High-resolution, open-source modeling of inland flooding impacts on the North Carolina bulk electric power grid

“…Quantitative evaluations of the effects of hurricanes on the power grid have been conducted in the past. For instance, in [18], an approach using a geospatial tool that incorporates high wind speed estimates overlaid with a U.S. electric service area map was employed to identify impacted grid assets during Hurricane Sandy. The importance of incorporating maintenance and system hardening for critical power infrastructure components was analyzed in [19] using the relationship between El Niño/La Niña and their seasonal effects on hurricane arrivals over a long-term climatological horizon.…”