Extreme weather alert: How utilities are adapting to a changing climate
By Frank Stern, Sarah Hendel-Blackford, Kaboo Leung, Ian Trim Rodrigo Leal and Danielle Vitoff
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[In the U.S.,] Con Ed has fortified perimeter walls, installed gates and floodwalls and raised critical equipment out of harm's way. It has reinforced flood-prone locations to ensure that power keeps flowing during the most severe floods and customer outages are greatly reduced.
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The Department of Defense (DoD) has established energy resilience as one aspect of the enterprise, mission assurance and readiness, reflecting its understanding of the vulnerability of the U.S. grid to environmental hazards and cybersecurity.
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[In Europe,] Electricité de France increased distribution network resilience by burying high voltage networks to minimize disruption due to extreme weather, investing and deploying measures for flooding and heatwaves, integrating climate risk and impacts into new nuclear plant design, and implementing an assessment procedure for existing plants, among others.
Other utilities in the U.K. have also assessed the impacts of a changing climate and implemented additional measures.
For example, ENGIE upgraded the water pumps in one of its power stations to cope with the decreasing water quality caused by the changing precipitation patterns. Drax Power undertook a multi-port fuel supply strategy for its biomass plant to prevent supply chain disruption from localized extreme events like storm surges and implemented flood defenses including storm surge barriers for conveyor tunnels, above-ground design for substations, and sea walls, among others.
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