Designing resilient decentralized energy systems: The importance of modeling extreme events and long-duration power outages

Abstract

Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires decarbonizing electricity while ensuring resilience of supply, since a warming planet will lead to greater extremes in weather and, plausibly, in power outages. Although it is well known that longduration outages severely impact economies, such outages are usually not well characterized or modeled in grid infrastructure planning tools. Here, we bring together data and modeling techniques and show how they can be used to characterize and model long-duration outages. We illustrate how to integrate outages in planning tools for one promising mode of resilient energy supply-microgrids. Failing to treat these extremes in models can lead to microgrid designs (1) that do not realize their full value of resilience, since models do not see the benefits of protecting against extremes, and (2) that appear reliable on paper yet do not actually protect against extremes. Although utilities record power interruptions, lack of access to that data is hindering research on resilience; making datasets available publicly would substantially aid efforts to improve grid planning tools.

Hardware-Software Codesign for Peer-to-Peer Energy Market Resolution

“…Thus, preliminary simulations -both from systems operators and researchers-are necessary for numerous purposes: designing the rules of this new market, assessing its performances, guaranteeing its safety, and anticipating new infrastructures. These simulations must be done on realistic study cases, i.e., large-dimension cases, to observe the algorithm's scale effects [9], and over a long period to keep temporal coherency while verifying the behavior during extreme events [10]. As these simulations are performed upstream of the actual deployment, they cannot yet involve the distributed computing capacities of the agents that will be involved in the future.…”

“…All operations must not be deported onto the GPU to optimize the processing time. For instance, in [10]- [11], only specific operations have been deported (such as the Jacobian matrix calculation) onto the GPU to reduce the processing time.…”

GPU Optimisation of an Endogenous Peer-to-Peer Market with Product Differentiation

“…However, before a possible actual deployment, numerous simulations are required from the research community, network managers, and normative authorities. In a non-exhaustive way, it will be necessary to judiciously parameterize the distributed management mechanisms [8], to verify the behavior during extreme events [9], or to ensure the robustness of the proposed solutions in case of faults on the power or communication network [10]. All these simulations cannot yet rely on the computational power provided in a distributed manner and must therefore be performed centrally on a single machine or computing cluster.…”

Exceedance Probabilities and Recurrence Intervals for Extended Power Outages in the United States

“…A significant barrier to resilience planning is the lack of publicly available data on the frequency and duration of extended power outages (Ji et al 2016). Hanna and Marqusee (2022) state that a "lack of access to comprehensive power outage data sets…make[s] it difficult to analyze complex interactions between long-duration outages and resilience." The absence of such outage duration information severely limits the ability to conduct quantitative cost-benefit analyses of resilience solutions.…”

“…Metrics and tools used to value short-duration outages rely on average outage durations and frequency, and they are insufficient for determining the cost of extended outages and the value of resilience solutions (Murphy et al 2020). Quantitative cost-benefit assessments of resilience solutions depend on the frequency and duration of extended power outages (NYSERDA 2014;Willis and Kia 2015), and they can depend particularly on low-probability, high-consequence outages (Hanna and Marqusee 2022).…”