A Comprehensive Review: Impacts of Extreme Temperatures due to Climate Change on Power Grid Infrastructure and Operation

TL;DR

This review paper analyzes how extreme temperature events due to climate change affect power grid infrastructure, highlighting vulnerabilities, impacts, and mitigation strategies to inform grid resilience planning.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of grid equipment vulnerabilities to extreme temperatures and develops insights on standards, failure modes, and cascading effects.

Findings

Extreme temperature events are increasing in frequency and severity.

Certain grid components are highly vulnerable to heat and cold extremes.

Gaps exist in standards and mitigation strategies for extreme temperature impacts.

Abstract

The power grid is experiencing a multi-fold transformation while the global climate evolves with record-breaking extreme temperatures during heat domes, polar vortices, and severe ice. Over the decades, these extreme temperature events have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity. The power grid infrastructure is geographically spread over thousands of square miles with millions of small and large components, and the impact of extreme temperature operations on the grid infrastructure needs to be researched further. This paper reviews academic literature, standards, industry articles, and federal reports to identify the impacts of heat domes, polar vortices, and icing on all the T&D grid equipment, including substations (assets owned and operated by the utilities and independent system operators). This paper classifies the equipment into primary and auxiliary equipment and determines its vulnerability to extreme temperatures for a deeper analysis of a more critical and vulnerable set of grid equipment. For each equipment under consideration, its fundamental role in the system, the impact of extreme temperatures on its operation, available monitoring, and mitigation of these impacts are discussed. The paper develops insights on standards readiness and identifies gaps concerning extreme temperature definitions. The paper also develops summary tables to identify the critical failure modes for each type of equipment, failure influence diagrams, and cascading influence diagrams to highlight and aid in translating the equipment vulnerability information into power grid contingency definitions that need to be considered in grid planning and operations.