Predicting the Impact of Climate Change on U.S. Power Grids and Its Wider Implications on National Security
Pak Chung Wong, L. Ruby Leung, Ning Lu, and Mike Scott
This project is part of a broader investigation of how climate change, energy efficiency/conservation, grid vulnerability, infrastructure integrity interact with one another. This research is continued in FY10 as: Energy Efficiency/Conservation & Grid Vulnerability.
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Executive Summary
This project addresses both physical and human factors involved in the interplay of energy, security, and the environment to help anticipate infrastructure protection challenges that arise from the impact of climate change on power grids. The system creates viable future scenarios that address both physical and human factors involved in the model domains. These scenarios suggest confidence levels to help decision makers formulate a coherent, unified strategy towards building a safe and secure society.
Projects
Using 11 U.S. western-region cities, with current interest in Portland, Oregon, and Phoenix, Arizona, the study focuses on climate change and how environmental variables can affect transmission load and power generation as well as their social impacts. Scenarios are generated based on climate simulation and then examined through two loops, one considering shortages or loss of electricity and the other on the impact to the population through environmental, economic, and reliability-based factors.
We live in a society that is vitally dependent on a network infrastructure of natural, man-made, and human resources to function ?from food to water supplies, from electric power to other fuel sources, and from communication and transportation to medical and emergency services. While these resources are seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our society, electric power has the highest “network reachability,” and all the other network resources depend on it to operate. Losing electric power inevitably impairs the ability of the other resources to perform, which could cripple society if a widespread outage persisted for prolonged periods.
Impacts
This project enables the prediction of the impact of climate change on U.S. power grids and its implications on national security. These scenarios provide a solid theoretical foundation and a sound empirical base for policy and decision makers to prepare a unified plan for building a safe and secure society. The predictive tool and underlying theories will continue to provide a reliable and powerful system for researchers to conduct cross-domain modeling work and fine tune theories as society continues to change.