Assessing the Impacts of Extreme Temperatures and Water Availability on the Resilience of the GB Power System

Extreme weather events or more in general changing environmental conditions (for instance due to climate change) might have significant impacts on future power systems, threatening their resilient operation. In this context, this paper provides a quantitative analysis of the temperature and water availability effects on power system resilience. Differently from most existing work that only addresses the impact on individual power plants and independently of the context, a system level assessment is conducted here through a time-series model that specifically considers the temperature sensitivity and the impact of water availability on the cooling systems of all conventional thermal power plants, as well as the temperature sensitivity of line capacities and of electrical demand throughout the network. Sequential Monte Carlo Simulation (SMCS) is used to capture the stochastic impacts of such phenomena and derive relevant impact metrics. The model is demonstrated on a 29-bus reduced representation of the Great Britain (GB) transmission network. Several future scenarios for future generation and demand are formulated with different corresponding weather parameter. The results help recognize the vulnerability and resilience of future GB power systems to extreme weather events under different conditions.