Terminology
Resilience
The ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a potentially hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions.
Source: A. Lavell et al
Reliability
Examining the frequency and duration of the outages caused by common failures. Hazard The potential occurrence of a natural or human-induced physical event or trend or physical impact that may cause loss of life, injury, or other health impacts, as well as damage and loss to property, infrastructure, livelihoods, service provision, ecosystems, and environmental resources. In this report, the term hazard usually refers to climate-related physical events or trends or their physical impacts.
Source: F. H. Jufri, V. Widiputra, and J. Jung
Risk
The potential for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is uncertain,recognizing the diversity of values. Risk is often represented as probability of occurrence of hazardous events or trends multiplied by the impacts if these events or trends occur.
Source: M. Oppenheimer et al.
Vulnerability
The propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected. Vulnerability encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt.
Source: M. Oppenheimer et al.
Exposure
The presence of people, livelihoods, species or ecosystems, environmental functions, services, and resources, infrastructure, or economic, social, or cultural assets in places and settings that could be adversely affected.
Source: M. Oppenheimer et al.
Vulnerabilities -
National Grid / Distribution Network / Local Feeders
- Storms and floods: Tropical cyclones / hurricanes / Tornadoes. Considered “very intense” are set to increase by 13% under 2°C warming scenarios. Overhead cables are vulnerable to storms due to falling trees and flying debris. And floods pose a threat to underground cables, substations and transformers.
- Wildfires: The number of wildfires in some areas around the world are forecast to increase 50% by the end of the century. Transmission lines and switchyards are vulnerable to wildfires.
- Earthquakes: Earthquakes will remain a hazard to our electricity systems. This is due to both the initial shocks and the knock-on disasters such as tsunamis. Earthquakes particularly threaten substation, specifically transformers and circuit breakers.
- Sea level rise: The IPCC reports that the sea-level is at risk of increasing by 0.5m to 1m by 2100. Under worse circumstances, this could be as high as 1.75 meters. Sea-level rise will threaten substations, transformers and underground cables.
- Increased average temperatures: The planet is warming due to climate change but not all regions will experience the same effects. In a scenario where we can limit this warming to an average of 2 C, all land-regions are set to experience an increased average temperature of 0.5 to 3.5 C. This increase in temperature can alter consumer consumption and increase demand ultimately putting pressure on the network. Additionally, network components such as transformers, cables, and busbars, are all affected by temperature which may impact their capacity and life-span.
- Cyber attacks: Increased digitisation of our electricity networks also increases our vulnerability to cyber attacks. This can involve things like eavesdropping, denial of service, bad data injection, data packet modification.
Based on work by Dr Katherine Collett - "Resilience of a Smart, Low-Carbon Power System"