A Valuation Framework for Customers Impacted by Extreme Temperature-Related Outages

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive valuation framework that assesses both economic and non-energy impacts of extreme temperature outages, incorporating customer characteristics and grid response to improve resilience planning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, holistic approach to quantify customer impacts, including mortality and economic losses, during extreme temperature outages, using probabilistic loss scenarios and grid simulation.

Findings

Resilience improvements can reduce mortality risk by 16%.

Enhanced outage planning can cut non-energy impact costs by 74%.

The framework provides valuable insights for resilience decision-making.

Abstract

Extreme temperature outages can lead to not just economic losses but also various non-energy impacts (NEI) due to significant degradation of indoor operating conditions caused by service disruptions. However, existing resilience assessment approaches lack specificity for extreme temperature conditions. They often overlook temperature-related mortality and neglect the customer characteristics and grid response in the calculation, despite the significant influence of these factors on NEI-related economic losses. This paper aims to address these gaps by introducing a comprehensive framework to estimate the impact of resilience enhancement not only on the direct economic losses incurred by customers but also on potential NEI, including mortality and the value of statistical life during extreme temperature-related outages. The proposed resilience valuation integrates customer characteristics and grid response variables based on a scalable grid simulation environment. This study adopts a holistic approach to quantify customer-oriented economic impacts, utilizing probabilistic loss scenarios that incorporate health-related factors and damage/loss models as a function of exposure for valuation. The proposed methodology is demonstrated through comparative resilient outage planning, using grid response models emulating a Texas weather zone during the 2021 winter storm Uri. The case study results show that enhanced outage planning with hardened infrastructure can improve the system resilience and thereby reduce the relative risk of mortality by 16% and save the total costs related to non-energy impacts by 74%. These findings underscore the efficacy of the framework by assessing the financial implications of each case, providing valuable insights for decision-makers and stakeholders involved in extreme-weather related resilience planning for risk management and mitigation strategies.