Quantifying cascading power outages during climate extremes considering renewable energy integration

TL;DR

This paper develops a coupled climate-energy model to analyze how climate extremes and renewable energy integration influence cascading power outages, validated by a major blackout event and revealing new resilience patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupled climate-energy model that captures climate impacts on power systems and uncovers unexpected resilience behaviors during extreme events.

Findings

Early failure of critical components can improve system resilience.

Lower renewable integration levels have minimal impact on resilience.

High renewable integration without flexibility resources increases failure risk.

Abstract

Climate extremes, such as hurricanes, combined with large-scale integration of environment-sensitive renewables, could exacerbate the risk of widespread power outages. We introduce a coupled climate-energy model for cascading power outages, which comprehensively captures the impacts of evolving climate extremes on renewable generation, and transmission and distribution networks. The model is validated by the 2022 Puerto Rico catastrophic blackout during Hurricane Fiona, the first-ever system-wide blackout event with complete weather-induced outage records. The model presents a novel resilience pattern that was not captured by the present state-of-the-art models and reveals that early failure of certain critical components surprisingly enhances overall system resilience. Sensitivity analysis of various behind-the-meter solar integration scenarios demonstrates that lower integration levels (below 45%, including the current level) exhibit minimal impact on system resilience in this event. However, surpassing this critical level without additional flexibility resources can exacerbate the failure probability due to substantially enlarged energy imbalances.