Planning for Impacts of Floods and Clouds on Power

Newswise — On the heels of a Northeastern rainstorm that flooded towns on Long Island and claimed at least two lives in Connecticut, teams of scientists, engineers, and representatives of local power and transportation utilities met to discuss the increasing frequency of severe weather and its impacts on crucial infrastructure. The timing for the meeting at New York’s Kennedy International Airport August 21-22, 2024, was a coincidence. But the recent storm set the stage for a series of frank discussions about how power systems and the people and services that depend on them will respond to a changing climate.

The Climate READi Northeast Regional Workshop was co-hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was the final workshop of four hosted around the country by EPRI as part of its Climate REsilience and ADaptation Initiative (Climate READi). After a first day of training sessions on working with climate data, the group convened for presentations and conversations about the impacts of flooding and clouds.

“This workshop is all about the future of the power system in a world affected by climate change,” said Martin Schoonen, Brookhaven Lab’s associate laboratory director for Environment, Biology, Nuclear Science & Nonproliferation, in his welcoming remarks on day two. “The power system underpins many of the systems that support society, such as transportation, healthcare delivery, sewage treatment, and communications.”

Schoonen reminded attendees that while superstorms with devastating impacts may still be relatively rare in the Northeast, heavy rains capable of disrupting services are becoming more frequent.

“Brookhaven’s research in atmospheric and climate science is crucial in understanding the climate system at the fundamental level, but we are also using this knowledge to help utilities in predicting and optimizing restitution after outages associated with local storms,” he said.

Solving problems together

Morgan Scott, director of Climate READi and sustainability and ecosystem stewardship at EPRI, hosted the day’s sessions and encouraged networking to strengthen ties and the potential for collaboration.

“These workshops are a great opportunity to focus on topics that are regionally specific, which is important because the impacts of climate change can be hyperlocal,” she said. “We want to make sure we are thinking about the hazard itself first — what is the science telling us? — and then talk about how the impacts will change. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the scientific community and power system practitioners.”

The theme of collaboration continued with keynote speaker Steve Hammer describing plans for the New York Climate Exchange — a center planned for New York’s Governor’s Island where interdisciplinary teams will develop solutions to climate challenges — for which he serves as chief executive officer.

“You need to bring people together,” he said, emphasizing the importance of both private sector and public partners, “and you need communities at the table.”

Citing two examples the Exchange might tackle — creating ways to recycle and reuse electric vehicle batteries and developing an open-source data platform for integrating large-scale climate modeling into building electric grid resilience — he said, “We want to work on big, complex stuff.” He encouraged attendees to get involved and attend events organized by the Exchange even before physical buildings are in place on Governor’s Island.

Deep dives into science and impacts

The next series of speakers took deep dives into science topics — floods in the morning and clouds in the afternoon — followed by panelists discussing the specific impacts on power infrastructure and communities.

Bernice Rosenzweig of Sarah Lawrence College gave an overview of how all four major kinds of flooding — coastal flooding, as from storm surges and wind; torrential rain; spillover from waterways; and inundation from rising groundwater — are projected to increase in a warming climate. Often these processes combine to trigger flooding far from official “flood zones,” she said.

Among many possible impacts, she described how saltwater intrusion would increase corrosion of crucial infrastructure and increased pumping would place further demands on our energy systems.

Mike Ragona, a Con Edison power company engineer, and Eric Willson, who heads up climate resilience and sustainability planning for construction and development at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), gave examples of the impacts of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and other major storms on neighborhoods, subway stations, and power and service disruptions. They also described plans for the future, including keeping current transportation and power equipment running while also investing in relocating infrastructure and/or developing technologies that can withstand inevitable submersion.

Ed Kearns, a climate scientist and chief data officer at First Street Foundation, emphasized the need to connect climate change to financial risk. People need to know “how much is this going to cost me in dollars — whether insurance or repairs?” he said. He’s working with data collected over the past 30 years to develop high-resolution models of infrastructure and projected flood risks. “We look at properties, buildings, power transmission lines and build hazard layers to figure out what needs to be done to prepare for climate change,” he said.

David Parsons, a senior advisor in the Grid Deployment Office of DOE, noted the challenges of dealing with threats from weather while also aiming to more than double the capacity of the nation’s electrical grid.

“Our grid is not up to the task; it’s not built to withstand these kinds of threats,” he said.

He noted that some solutions, such as advanced conductors, are already commercially available and that DOE is working to help utilities get them. He also described a series of recently awarded grid innovation grants — 57 projects in 44 states — as the largest single investment in electric grid infrastructure in U.S. history, with a new round of projects just announced that will further increase capacity and potentially generate 5,000 jobs.

By working with national labs, industry, universities, states, territories, tribes, and utilities, he said, “Our goal is to implement effective grid resilience projects; share best practices, metrics, data, and tools; and build knowledge.”

Cloudcasting

After a discussion of dams as both a potential clean-power solution and source of flood risk and other approaches to achieve alternative energy goals, including solar, Brookhaven’s Schoonen presented the complicated story of clouds, a major area of research at Brookhaven Lab.

“There’s a lot of physics that goes into generating clouds and how they evolve over time and dissipate,” he said.

Aside from casting shadows on solar panels and lowering their energy output, clouds have many direct and indirect effects on climate. They can reflect and/or scatter sunlight, and they can also trap heat. As a result, there’s a large dose of uncertainty in how clouds ultimately impact Earth’s energy balance, Schoonen said.

“About 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by clouds at any time,” he noted. “We have to get this right to model climate.” In addition, clouds are the building blocks of storms and severe weather. “We want to get at how they form and understand how they sometimes become so violent.”

One of the biggest challenges is that the processes that affect clouds and their interactions with the overall atmosphere occur over a wide range of time and length scales — from millimeter-sized small cloud droplets to tens of thousands of kilometers above and across Earth’s atmosphere, with some of the physics playing out in seconds! “Modeling the smallest scale is computationally expensive and global climate models don’t capture the fine scale processes,” Schoonen said. Meanwhile, the weather models we rely on sit somewhere in the middle. Brookhaven scientists are working on ways to transfer their studies of small-scale processes to the 100-kilometer scale of the bigger models.

They’re also exploring the impacts of aerosols, tiny particles that come from both natural and industrial sources that seed initial cloud droplet formation. Schoonen noted that pollutants may limit the growth of cloud droplets to the point that they don’t get heavy enough to fall as rain — until so many accumulate that clouds grow into giants, with the result being more vigorous thunderstorms and heavy downpours.

Schoonen proposed that being able to create clouds in a laboratory environment — “a cloud in a box” — would help scientists “start to get at how the aerosols interact with the droplets and influence the cloud formation processes and precipitation.”

Such a facility could also be used to explore how deliberately changing cloud properties might offset or mitigate global warming, for example by “brightening” clouds to increase the reflection of sunlight.

“We need to understand the consequences — and the unintended consequences — in terms of the chemical and physical processes. And I’d much rather do it in a cloud chamber than out in the open,” Schoonen said.

Brookhaven is also working to quantify the impact of atmospheric cloud coverage on solar array power dips. Such “nowcasting” would improve power providers’ ability to predict how energy output matches up with demand.

The urban energy system

The final round of speakers expanded on the need for improved forecasting of local power load demands in New York City and on Long Island.

Jorge Gonzalez-Cruz, a scientist at the University of Albany with a joint appointment at Brookhaven Lab, emphasized the urban heat island effect, including how buildings change the demand for power and emit heat. “We need to understand the interaction of the built environment with the weather and climate system,” he said.

Working with collaborators, he built a model to produce long-term forecasting of demand for air conditioning going out to the late 2000s under different levels of global warming. He noted that low-rise buildings appear to be more sensitive to climate change than high-rises.

Gonzalez-Cruz is also exploring how the electrification of buildings in New York City — going from boilers to air-source heat pumps, for example — will impact local temperatures and whether we’ll have enough solar and offshore wind power to supply the electricity demands of such systems.

Bryan Irrgang, who’s responsible for electrical load forecasting for the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), discussed the increasing electrical demands that will come from increased use of electric vehicles (EVs).

“Forecasts from 20 years ago didn’t include much about EVs. It was a small percentage of our load,” he said. “But it’s going to be very impactful over the next 20 years — up to about one-third more load.”

To deal with that increased demand, he said, “We’ve introduced timed rates to incentivize not ramping up demand at peak times,” suggesting that EV owners and the power grid would both benefit if drivers charged their cars at night.

That triggered a question about the impact of heat waves from co-panelist Gonzalez-Cruz: “Will we have enough juice to generate for all those days? If the temperature stays high at night and there is no relief, how is the system going to respond to sustained periods of high demand?”

The discussion continued with questions about the impact of data centers, a flip in peak demand from summer to winter if electrically powered air pumps become a primary heating source, and more. Session moderator Andrea Staid of EPRI ended with a big one for the panelists: “If you could have one magical bit of data or tool, what would it be?”

LIPA’s Irrgang brought the workshop full circle with his reply: “Ultimately, a forecast is an agreement that this is a reasonable picture of what the future looks like. And there’s a lot of input on that; everyone has something to say. So, the one magical tool I’d want is collaboration.”

Check for the publication of the Framework developed from the content of the series of four Climate READi workshops on the EPRI website, along with news about opportunities going forward.

“While the workshop series is over, the work certainly isn’t,” EPRI’s Morgan Scott said. “We are committed to building this community and working with this community towards building resilience in our power systems.”

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

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