Power Utilities Face Unique Challenges from Climate Change

Yet, of all of them, the electrical power sector confronts a uniquely imposing set of challenges thrown down by the threats that extreme weather poses to their generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure.
For example:

• Older assets may have been designed for a climatic environment that no longer exists.
• Asset portfolios, spread over long distances and subject to location-specific conditions, are exposed to multiple perils: flooding, extreme heat and cold, high winds, severe convective storms that generate hail and lightning, and wildfire.
• Characteristics of the assets themselves—from linear assets like transmission lines to the pylons across the grid to the stations, substations and transformers along the network—are highly diverse.

The potential consequences are immense for power utilities who fail to manage climate risk.

In North America, Pacific Gas & Electric offers the most extreme example: in 2019, it filed for bankruptcy after it was blamed for catastrophic wildfires of the previous two years; then, in 2020, it pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter stemming from the deadly 2018 “Camp” fire that destroyed an entire California community.

Risk Management and Resiliency Best Practices Start with Climate Data

To mitigate such a massive risk, electrical utilities are working with Jupiter Intelligence and firms such as Guidehouse, a Jupiter partner and global leader in sustainability and resiliency consulting. We’re helping power companies integrate Jupiter’s best-in-science, forward-focused physical climate risk projections into their risk engineering processes and workflows, to:

• Improve their ability to identify, and quantify the impacts of, unaddressed risk from climate perils across their far-flung asset portfolios, multiple emissions scenarios, and time horizons
• Inform risk forecasts based on the financial impacts of the failure (temporary or long-term) of these assets
• Develop resilience engineering and capital investment strategies that result in the hardening and retrofitting of existing assets, and
• Optimize site planning and design decisions for new assets.

How to Find Out More

Three new resources offer insight and detail into these activities.

In this video, we discuss the latest advances in physical climate risk data, and how that data can be integrated into resiliency analysis workflows, before the UK National Committee of CIGRE, the international community that fosters the collaborative development and sharing of end-to-end power system expertise.

This blog, published by Guidehouse, contains an excellent presentation of its Resilience Risk Assessment Approach for power companies, and the role that Jupiter data play in that approach.

The IEA (International Energy Agency) recently published their World Energy Outlook Report 2022, where Jupiter’s physical climate risk metrics were used to quantify the financial impact of four critical energy infrastructure sites around the world.

In addition, we urge you to schedule a demo of ClimateScore Global, Jupiter’s portfolio-level climate risk analysis tool, to speak one-on-one with a Jupiter expert.