The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Planning for Resource Adequacy

Abstract

Resource Adequacy in the electric power industry has historically focused on sufficient capacity (MW) to serve load on what was forecast to be the worst demand day of the year. The incorporation of intermittent resources both in front of and behind the meter, common mode events and the realization that the metric for reliability should focus on the loss to consumers is refocusing resource adequacy on probabilistic approaches to measurement and analysis. In this paper we focus on planning for resource adequacy given an increasingly stochastic environment in which extreme events caused in large part by changing weather patterns are having increasingly devastating impacts on consumers. These events can no longer be perceived and as being independent (the outage of a generating unit or a line) but are correlated, statistically in both space and time. We argue that there is a need for the definition of probabilistic metrics and methodologies that, over space and time can be used to incorporate the stochastics of common mode and high impact supply disruptions