Announcing the Electric Resilience Toolkit
photo: Brett Sells on Pexels
Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Protection Fund, and the Climate Risk and Resilience Law Initiative released a report today. Electric Resilience Toolkit Support policymakers and stakeholders in their work on electricity sector regulation and climate resilience planning. Such planning is critical to ensuring that power infrastructure is designed and operated to take into account the impacts of climate change – impacts that are already visible and will only intensify in the coming years.
Heatwaves, wildfires, storms and other extreme events exacerbated by climate change pose significant risks to U.S. generation, transmission and distribution assets. Just this past weekend, extreme heat in Texas caused power distribution infrastructure to fail in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, knocking out power to about 1,000 homes and businesses.More Texan experiences power failure Last year, when extreme low temperatures associated with winter storm Uri forced many power plants to close, tragedy That shouldn’t happen. Also last year, Hurricane Ida caused widespread damage to power lines in Louisiana, causing widespread power outages. And, the previous year, California saw multi-day rolling blackouts when a combination of heat, drought and wildfires reduced power generation and lost major transmission lines.
As these examples demonstrate, more frequent and severe extreme weather events brought about by climate change are already stressing the power system. In addition to extreme weather, utilities and system operators must prepare for changes in baseline weather and environmental conditions, such as higher average temperatures and sea levels, when planning and operating grids. For example, coastal communities are now seeing twice as many high tide flooding days as they did 20 years ago due to rising sea levels. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that the frequency of “major” high-tide flooding events — when coastal water levels exceed average high water levels by 4 feet — will increase by 400 percent between 2020 and 2050. Significant impact on coastal energy facilities, past research has identified nearly 300 such facilities within 4 feet of common high tide levels.
To address the risks posed by climate change, utilities must engage in climate resilience planning, a two-phase process through which utilities (1) identify climate-related vulnerabilities in their systems, and (2) explore mitigation and options for managing these vulnerabilities in a manner consistent with reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding maladaptive behaviors that exacerbate the climate crisis. This kind of planning has been endorsed by the U.S. Department of Energy and other agencies, but has not yet been widely adopted by utilities. Relatively few utilities are involved in comprehensive climate resilience planning, and many cite the inherent uncertainty of climate change and the challenges associated with studying it as reasons for inaction. Where climate resilience planning is undertaken, utilities typically focus only or primarily on event-based climate impacts (such as storms) while ignoring more gradual changes (such as temperature and sea level rise), considering only a subset of their assets climate impacts rather than the entire system, or assess asset vulnerability based solely on historical weather data that do not fully explain future climate change.
This Electric Resilience Toolkit Designed to provide engagement-focused information that is directly used in regulatory processes to support well-designed climate resilience planning by utilities.
The kit is divided into four parts. The first to determine how the effects of climate change (such as extreme heat, sea level rise, etc.) affect electricity infrastructure. The second explains the climate resilience planning process. Part III organizes key scientific data and tools available for climate resilience planning. Part IV describes several legal bases for the State Public Utilities Commission to require robust climate resiliency planning and highlights the key legal risks that utilities will face if they fail to participate in such planning.
Each section of the toolkit contains a summary of resources such as resiliency planning guides, modeling tools, sample regulatory documents, and State Public Utilities Commission orders related to climate resiliency planning.
This toolkit complements Sections 1 to 3 of the report, Climate Risk in the Power Sector: The Legal Obligation of Power Companies to Advance Climate Resilience Planningjointly published by the Environmental Protection Fund and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in December 2020, and published by Environmental Law Review in 2021.
you can visit Toolkit is here.
This article was co-authored by Romany Webb of the Sabine Center and Noha Haggag and Michael Panfil of the Environmental Conservation Foundation.
