Climate Change
Latest from the PES
Artificial Intelligence Will Unlock the Era of Energy Efficiency
By Diane Watkins, IEEE PES Vice President of Technical Activities
Global Energy Inequity: The Importance of Leaving No Nation Behind
The challenge of energy reliability, or the ability to keep the power on to meet current and future demand, is a real one.
In the Face of Extreme Weather, Resiliency is Engineered
Over the past 10 days, America has once again been reminded of the tragic and devasting impact that hurricanes can have on communities. What is different this time, however, is that the extent of human loss and infrastructure damage from Hurricane Helene extended far inland, and far beyond the coastal impact on Florida; bringing heavy rains and flooding as far north as North Carolina and Virginia.
To Fight Climate Change, We Must Invest More in the Right Places
Climate change is not a new concern. Scientists have been sounding a steady drumbeat for decades. In 1970, Earth Day was organized as the first large-scale environmental movement calling for the protection of all life on earth. In the 54 years since, over 1 billion people mobilize each Earth Day with renewed enthusiasm for protecting our planet — yet the threat posed by climate change and the need to act grows.
Survey on the Role of Engineers in Addressing Climate Change
Last fall, IEEE PES commissioned a nationwide survey to gauge the public’s perception of climate change, and specifically the role of engineers in driving solutions to combat climate change.
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IEEE PES CLIMATE CHANGE MISSION STATEMENT: We will build a cleaner energy future by promoting smart and innovative engineered solutions and standards that provide sustainable energy for the world to fight global climate change. Utilizing our strong belief in science, technical knowledge, and broad talents, our IEEE PES members and experts are committed to partnering across academia, business, community and the policy world, to engineer the cleaner energy future that will serve every nation for generations to come.
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In the Face of Extreme Weather, Resiliency is Engineered
By Dr. Shay Bahramirad, IEEE PES President
To Fight Climate Change, We Must Invest More in the Right Places
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Survey on the Role of Engineers in Addressing Climate Change
Last fall, IEEE PES commissioned a nationwide survey to gauge the public’s perception of climate change, and specifically the role of engineers in driving solutions to combat climate change.
Other IEEE Climate Change Resources
IEEE’s mission is to advance technology for the benefit of humanity. Today the world faces its largest modern-day threat—climate change. We recognize this global crisis and are committed to helping combat and mitigate the effects of climate change through pragmatic and accessible technical solutions and providing engineers and technologists with a neutral space for discussion and action.
IEEE PES Perspectives
Our members have made climate change initiatives a priority. Read what they have to say about power and energy, and how we can make a difference through the smart applications of technology.
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ComEd Grid Labs-Why the Power Sector Needs Advanced Labs
The severity and frequency of severe weather events has risen in recent years due to climate change, while cyber-attacks have also become more of a threat as technological advances threaten to outpace cyber security. Stakeholders have recognized the imperative nature of supplying sustainable, resilient power to every community. The power industry, and particularly advanced utilities have been working tirelessly to ensure the resiliency of the power grid, and to lead the transformation into grid of the future. Labs play a particularly important role in this transformation as will enable an accurate and expedited system modeling and analysis. The paper discusses ComEd's efforts, as the largest electric utility in the state of Illinois serving more than 4 million customers, to build ...
Operational Security in 100% Inverter-Based Power Systems: Experiences from Hawai‘i
The integration of renewable generation in electrical power systems is exponentially increasing for multiple reasons. First, a fast decarbonization of the electrical energy system is a critical milestone to slow climate change and facilitate the decarbonization of other energy sectors, such as transportation and heat. Second, renewable generation from wind and solar have become much cheaper compared to conventional sources like gas, coal, and nuclear. Third, renewable generation is in many cases decentralized, which increases the resilience of the energy system, for example, in the face of natural disasters.
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Hydrogen-Powered Aircraft: Hydrogen-Electric Hybrid Propulsion for Aviation
The ever-increasing demand for passenger air travel means unprecedented aircraft market growth in the coming decades. However, large airline fleets lead to serious environmental concerns. A clear goal was set during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26): securing global net-zero emissions by midcentury while keeping 1.5 °C of temperature rise within reach. Hydrogen (H 2 ) propulsion technology provides one of the most promising opportunities to meet this target and decarbonize global aviation. Thus, this article reviews and collates state-of-the-art research related to H 2 –electric hybrid aircraft. After introducing the potential benefits of H 2 propulsion, fuel cell (FC) auxiliary power in airplanes and H 2 FC-powered aircraft are discussed.
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Strengthening Transmission System Resilience Against Extreme Weather Events by Undergrounding Selected Lines
Natural disasters, such as extreme weather events (EWEs), can cause significant damage to power systems. In fact, it is expected that the intensity and frequency of EWEs will increase the next years due to climate change, making power system resilience enhancement necessary. This paper proposes a transmission resilience planning solution by determining the lines to be placed underground in order to minimize load shedding in the most cost-efficient way taking into account historical EWEs (HEWEs).
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Lighting a Reliable Path to 100% Clean Electricity: Evolving Resource Adequacy Practices for a Decarbonizing Grid
It is the year 2045 in the carbon-neutral southwestern United States. While summer heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity because of climate change, the region’s abundant solar generation produces tremendous amounts of low-cost energy on hot summer days. This energy not only serves daytime loads but it also charges an enormous fleet of batteries that, aided by wind and geothermal power, discharge overnight to effectively eliminate summertime electric reliability concerns.
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Mobile and Portable De-Icing Devices for Enhancing the Distribution System Resilience Against Ice Storms: Preventive Strategies for Damage Control
Climate change has reportedly increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rains, hurricanes, tornados, flood, fire, and ice storms. Ice storms are considered one of the most severe natural disasters that can disrupt people's daily lives and incur infrastructural damages. Ice storms are the leading cause of large-scale power outages in the United States and elsewhere during the winter season. The damage caused by ice storms can easily result in major power outages, blackouts, and at times shut down entire metropolitan areas.
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Utility-Scale Shared Energy Storage: Business Models for Utility-Scale Shared Energy Storage Systems and Customer Participation
Due to climate change, supply scarcity, and society’s desire to expand access to electricity and improve energy-system resilience, there has been an increasing demand to invest in and use renewable energy sources (RESs) that are environmentally friendly, efficient, sustainable, and affordable. This has diversified and decentralized energy sources and increased their penetration.
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Multi-Energy Microgrids: Designing, Operation Under New Business Models, and Engineering Practices in China
With the global awareness of climate change and environmental problems, major powers over the world have set their goals to contribute to a low-carbon society. China announced the target of "carbon peak and carbon neutrality," requiring a cleaner, carbonfree, economic, and sustainable energy system. To this end, there are two promising approaches. The first is to increase the penetration of clean energies, such as wind power and photovoltaics (PVs). This can reduce carbon emissions effectively.
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Data-Driven Classifier for Extreme Outage Prediction Based On Bayes Decision Theory
The growing concern over catastrophic weather events, mostly as a direct result of climate changes, has underscored the need for expanding traditional power system contingency analyses to handle the associated risks of extreme power outages. To enable power system operators to make timely decisions when facing extreme events, we explore in this paper the viability of a classifier which uses the machine learning approach based on the Bayes decision theory as a means of predicting power system component outages.
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Enable a Carbon Efficient Power Grid via Minimal Uplift Payments
The COVID-19 has slowed down global economic growth. Meanwhile, it also significantly cuts the global carbon emission, which provides a golden opportunity for the whole world to combat the climate change together. While the former policies (e.g., the CAFE standards, renewable portfolio standards, etc.) have reduced certain level of fossil fuel consumption, the most effective measures (such as carbon tax, cap-and-trade programs) are still far from ready for global implementation. This paper investigates an alternative way to achieve a more carbon efficient power grid using the uplift payment scheme.
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Islanding Detection of Grid-Forming Inverters: Mechanism, Methods, and Challenges
Over the past decades, because of boosted energy demands and the serious concerns of climate change, inverter-based resources (IBRs) have been widely deployed to integrate renewable energy into power systems for the goal of carbon neutrality. Thanks to the full controllability of power electronic devices, IBRs have the capability to implement reliable and flexible power regulation, which makes them technically feasible for enhancing the resilience and energy efficiency of power systems.
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Intra-Hour Photovoltaic Generation Forecasting Based on Multi-Source Data and Deep Learning Methods
Global issues pertaining to climate change have necessitated the rapid deployment of new energy sources, such as photovoltaic (PV) generation. In smart grids, accurate forecasting is essential to ensure the reliability and economy of the power system. However, PV generation is severely affected by meteorological factors, which hinders accurate forecasting. Various types of data, such as local measurement data, numerical weather prediction, and satellite images, can reflect meteorological dynamics over different time scales. This paper proposes a novel data-driven forecasting framework based on deep learning, which integrates an advanced U-net and an encoder-decoder architecture to cooperatively process multi-source (time series recording and satellite image) data.
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Flexibility in Sustainable Electricity Systems: Multivector and Multisector Nexus Perspectives
As environmental concerns increase, researchers, policy makers, and the public in general are becoming more interested in options to make energy more sustainable while at the same time ensuring that energy systems are affordable, reliable, and resilient. This dynamic is bringing about challenges across the world, as established energy systems (such as those in cities) must be enhanced to integrate large volumes of renewable energy sources (RES), while new or evolving systems (for instance, in developing economies) must be planned to manage the increasingly extreme conditions associated with climate change.
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The Fragile Grid: The Physics and Economics of Security Services in Low-Carbon Power Systems
Worldwide, there are unstoppable forces toward low-carbon power systems that can support the fight against climate change and help solve the security of supply issues in many countries. Low-carbon grids are likely to be characterized by substantial renewable energy sources, both centralized and distributed, combined with intelligent and dynamic demand-side technology and multisector electrification (including heating, transport, and future fuels). In this context, successfully resolving the "affordability-sustainability-reliability" energy trilemma is crucial for paving the way to low-carbon energy futures.
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Latin American Energy Markets: Investment Opportunities in Nonconventional Renewables
Latin America is very rich from the point of view of its varied energy resources, with an abundance of hydroelectric generation and large reserves of fossil fuels. At present, although there is a general awareness of climate change issues associated with fossil fuel use, the facts show that economic needs over the short and medium terms are the engine of technology change.
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Supporting Energy Transition in Transmission Systems: An Operator’s Experience Using Electromagnetic Transient Simulation
The electric power industry is faced with the challenges of mitigating climate change, maintaining low electricity prices, and satisfying high reliability requirements for power supply. The increased application of power electronics devices is the inevitable result of the changes being experienced by the system. Careful analysis is required to install and operate power electronics devices. This article describes the use of electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation on the French transmission grid to meet these new challenges in the context of energy transition.
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A Numerical Approach for Hybrid Simulation of Power System Dynamics Considering Extreme Icing Events
The global climate change leads to more extreme meteorological conditions such as icing weather, which have caused great losses to power systems. Comprehensive simulation tools are required to enhance the capability of power system risk assessment under extreme weather conditions. A hybrid numerical simulation scheme integrating icing weather events with power system dynamics is proposed to extend power system numerical simulation. A technique is developed to efficiently simulate the interaction of slow dynamics of weather events and fast dynamics of power systems. An extended package for PSS/E enabling hybrid simulation of icing event and power system disturbance is developed, based on which a hybrid simulation platform is established.
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Planning With Multiple Transmission and Storage Investment Options Under Uncertainty: A Nested Decomposition Approach
Achieving the ambitious climate change mitigation objectives set by governments worldwide is bound to lead to unprecedented amounts of network investment to accommodate low-carbon sources of energy. Beyond investing in conventional transmission lines, new technologies, such as energy storage, can improve operational flexibility and assist with the cost-effective integration of renewables. Given the long lifetime of these network assets and their substantial capital cost, it is imperative to decide on their deployment on a long-term cost-benefit basis. In this paper, we propose a novel, efficient, and highly generalizable framework for solving large-scale planning problems under uncertainty by using a temporal decomposition scheme based on the principles of Nested Benders.
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A Probabilistic Transmission Planning Framework for Reducing Network Vulnerability to Extreme Events
The restructuring of electric power industry has brought in plenty of challenges for transmission expansion planning (TEP), mainly due to uncertainties. The commonly used probabilistic TEP approach requires the network to meet an acceptable risk criterion. However, a series of blackouts in recent years caused by extreme weather-related events have raised the concerns about network vulnerability through calculating the expected risk value. In this paper, we have proposed the concept that TEP should be economically adjusted in order to make network less vulnerable to extreme events (EEs) caused by climate change, e.g., floods or ice storms.
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Robust Resiliency-Oriented Operation of Active Distribution Networks Considering Windstorms
Recent climate changes have created intense natural disasters, such as windstorms, which can cause significant damages to power grids. System resilience is defined as the ability of the system to withstand such high-impact low-probability events. This paper proposes a robust resilient operational schedule for active distribution networks against windstorms. In order to capture dynamic behaviors of these disasters, zonal disaster-specific uncertainty sets associated with the windstorm are proposed.
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From Reliability to Resilience: Planning the Grid Against the Extremes
Although extreme events, mainly natural disasters and climate change-driven severe weather, are the result of naturally occurring processes, power system planners, regulators, and policy makers do not usually recognize them within network reliability standards. Instead, planners have historically designed the electric power infrastructure accounting for the so-called credible (or "average") outages that usually represent single or (some kind of) simultaneous faults (e.g., faults on double circuits).
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A Multi-State Model for Transmission System Resilience Enhancement Against Short-Circuit Faults Caused by Extreme Weather Events
Due to global climate change, the effect of extreme weather on power systems has attracted extensive attention. In the prior-art grid resilience studies, the hurricanes or wildfires are mainly defended in terms of expected line damages, while they are prone to trigger short-circuit fault (SCF) evolved with dynamic influence in reality. In this paper, a fragile model is developed to evaluate the nodal SCF probability considering the insulation aging of equipment and extreme weather condition.
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Stochastic Unit Commitment in Isolated Systems With Renewable Penetration Under CVaR Assessment
Isolated regions and islands are facing imported fossil-fuel dependency, higher electricity prices, and vulnerability to climate change. At the same time, they are increasing their renewable penetration and, therefore, risk for electric utilities. Integrating stochastic energy resources in noninterconnected systems may take advantage of an intelligent and optimized risk-averse unit commitment (UC) model. This paper presents a two-stage stochastic UC model with high renewable penetration including reserve requirements for the efficient management of uncertainty.
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Resilience Enhancement With Sequentially Proactive Operation Strategies
Extreme weather events, many of which are climate change related, are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity and causing catastrophic outages, reminding the need to enhance the resilience of power systems. This paper proposes a proactive operation strategy to enhance system resilience during an unfolding extreme event. The uncertain sequential transition of system states driven by the evolution of extreme events is modeled as a Markov process. At each decision epoch, the system topology is used to construct a Markov state. Transition probabilities are evaluated according to failure rates caused by extreme events.
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