18 US utilities team up on industrywide climate risk, adaptation project

Within less than a decade, Commonwealth Edison Co. faced two historic thunderstorms that spawned tornadoes, downed power lines, and left hundreds of thousands of its Chicago-area customers without power. The 2011 and 2020 disasters cost the utility an estimated $173 million just in restoration costs.

Such weather events used to be so rare they were called "century storms" but not anymore. More extreme heat days are taxing electric utility infrastructure as operators struggle to keep transformers and transmission and distribution lines cool and stave off outages.

ComEd has invested nearly $3.7 billion over the past decade in smart grid technology and new infrastructure to try to stay ahead of such challenges but says more is needed.

"We're absolutely in an unprecedented scenario here," Ryan Burg, ComEd's principal business analyst, said in an interview. "The pace at which the weather is changing is extraordinary."

To develop an industrywide approach for assessing future climate risks, leaders from ComEd's parent company, Exelon Corp., and 17 other power providers as of June 24, have teamed up to do just that. They also want to develop strategies that can help utilities adapt to the mounting challenges they are already facing.

Led by the Electric Power Research Institute, the first-of-a-kind initiative launched in April with 13 participants will develop consistent and science-based standards and guidance for power companies that must harden their systems while at the same time building them out to deliver more electricity as the country shifts away from other forms of energy.

Virtually all power providers today must contend with more extreme storms, sea-level rise, excessive heat, drought or other climate-related problems that threaten the reliability of their grid.

"Our member companies and their CEOs who sit on our board are experiencing all of this, and that is where the conversation started," Morgan Scott, director of EPRI's new initiative, dubbed Climate READi, said in an interview. "There was really a sense of urgency."

Bringing 'climate change thinking' to all

Scott noted that utilities have questions about climate forecasting data and from where to source it. They want to know how to scale modeling down to regional and local areas. And they need to understand how vulnerabilities in their systems will affect the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity down to the community level.

Over the next three years, the Climate READi initiative will create a platform companies can use to determine what investments they should make today to be better prepared for a warmer future.

"A lot of utilities wouldn't have the resources to even get started at it and they, too, need to be a part of the climate change thinking," Burg said. "I think that one of the areas where this effort is going to make a real contribution is with building standards that are accessible to a really wide variety of our utilities."

ComEd recently teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science to develop a climate risk and adaption study for the company. Expected to be finalized this fall, the study will feed into a multiyear grid plan ComEd plans to file with Illinois regulators in January 2023. It is also the first study to be launched in collaboration with the Climate READi initiative.

Beyond climate, the EPRI initiative can also help utilities hedge against other risks and save money on system upgrades, participants say.

"There are co-benefits from a framework like this," Jeff Burleson, Southern Co.'s senior vice president of environmental and system planning, said in an interview. "Hardening the grid could be helpful to counter cyber risks. And as we expand our grid, it's sometimes more effective if we already know where the biggest risks will be so we can build things into the system as we go."

Some utilities got a head start

A few electric utilities have already looked at their climate vulnerabilities and relied on scientists' climate projections to try to predict what challenges they will face in 2030 and 2050.

Southern California Edison Co. submitted its first climate adaptation vulnerability assessment to state regulators in May. With rainfall projected to become increasingly erratic, for example, SCE, an Edison International subsidiary, is looking at building flood walls at some substations to prevent damage. Longer and more intense heatwaves will require upgrades to air-conditioning equipment to keep power plants from overheating.

And to avoid outages from ever-more intense wildfires, the utility expects to install more fire-resistant poles or wrap them with a material that reduces the risk for damage.

In 2019, Consolidated Edison Inc. released what may have been the nation's first climate impact assessment, looking at how coastal storm surges, inland flooding, and extreme heat will affect the utility's electricity, natural gas and steam systems. The study was prompted by the widespread damage caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 at its New York City-area utility, Consolidated Edison Co. of New York Inc.

Con Edison has spent more than $1 billion on grid hardening projects since the disaster a decade ago.

Cooling a nuclear plant gets tough

Evidence of how power grids and plants are affected by the warming planet has been building for the past several years.

In 2018, for example, extreme heat forced operators to shut down a unit of the Ringhals nuclear plant in Sweden after Atlantic ocean water used to cool the plant approached 25 degrees C, according to a recent EPRI white paper.

More recently, smoke from wildfires in drought-stricken California reduced solar power production by 30% during the first two weeks of September 2020 by reducing sunlight, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that year.

Competition over water in Arizona is also affecting the nation's largest nuclear plant, the Palo Verde plant, located 45 miles west of Phoenix in the Sonoran Desert. Arizona Public Service Co., the operator of the plant, treats the wastewater used to cool the facility.

But with the price of wastewater at a premium in the drought-stricken state, the utility is now working with Sandia National Laboratory to develop a new cooling technology using supercritical carbon dioxide as a cooling medium. The technology may reduce the plant's dependence on water by 15% or more and is expected to be tested this summer.

Although Arizona Public Service has a water contract until 2050, costs are expected to double between 2021 and 2030, company spokesperson Michael Philipsen wrote in an email. The company spent more than $12 million on water in 2021 and in excess of $9 million to treat it before it could be used as a coolant.

By sharing insights through the Climate READi effort on how to operate under extreme heat, utilities in Arizona or California hope to help support utility executives in other states who are just beginning to struggle with sagging power lines or reduced power output due to unprecedented heat waves.

"We may have some of the same issues here in the South that they do in California," Southern's Burleson said. "If each utility does its own analysis this would cost all of us a lot more. That's the benefit of collaboration: We can leverage the dollar."

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