Rising Severe Weather from Climate Change Threatens Grid Operations and Increases Need for Resilience: Accenture Research

More than nine in 10 executives (95%) believe that climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions has been a contributing factor to increased extreme weather events that their electricity networks have experienced over the past 10 years, according to new research from Accenture. In addition, 90% believe an expected rise in severe weather poses an increased financial risk to their grid businesses.

The study — the sixth edition of Accenture’s Digitally Enabled Grid research — is based on a survey of more than 200 electric utility executives in 28 countries on five continents. Other key findings include:

• Almost three-quarters (73%) of survey respondents said that extreme weather events represent a significant challenge to network operations and safety.

• 92% said they expect severe weather to increase in the next 10 years.

• 88% said maintaining network resilience to extreme weather will result in significant increases in network prices for customers.

• At the same time, only one-quarter (24%) believe that their businesses are very well prepared to deal with the impact of extreme weather, with one in 12 (8%) reporting being poorly prepared.

“With various parts of the world affected by droughts, wildfires, and flooding in addition to the U.S. hurricane season just around the corner, climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and impacting the electricity grid,” said Stephanie Jamison, a global industry senior managing director who leads Accenture’s Utilities business. “Greater system flexibility, delivered through digital and emerging technologies, will be critical to optimizing grid resilience in a cost-effective and timely manner. For example, active management of available network redundancy, distributed generation and energy storage can help maintain power delivery during severe weather events and speed service restoration after network failures.”

“Around the world, high-impact weather-related events are becoming more frequent and more severe. In 2018, India’s southern state of Kerala suffered its worst monsoon flooding in a century severely impacting the electricity distribution infrastructure in the flood-ravaged areas. Events like this and Cyclone Fani in 2019 in eastern India have shown us the impact of extreme weather conditions in disrupting network operations,” said Sanjeev Arora, managing director and lead – Resources, Accenture in India. He added, “Utilities need a forward-looking, holistic and flexible grid resilience strategy, with right regulatory measures, proactive investments and maintenance, to bounce back quickly from major and even multiple events – whether it’s from extreme weather, cyberattacks, earthquake or even a pandemic. For instance, strategies implemented by India’s Power System Operation Corp (POSOCO) during the 9-minute lights out on April 5^th were a great example of how building resilience into the existing performance model can benefit utilities during unexpected events.”

Building Network Resilience 

More than nine in 10 respondents (95%) believe that building greater adaptability into the network — such as network reconfiguration, embedded storage, redundancy and voltage management — over the next 10 years will be critical to increasing overall resilience. Further, 93% see system flexibility as the most cost-effective approach to deliver long-term resilience.

In fact, nearly the same number of executives (93%) said that they are testing innovative solutions for grid resilience, including advanced protection systems, vehicle-to-grid technology, automated self-healing grids and drone inspections of damage factors.

However, enabling greater network flexibility remains a challenge. While 95% of executives believe that active management of distributed generation — including solar photovoltaics, wind power and energy storage — will be key to supporting network resilience in the long term, 84% said a lack of information on the location, size, specification and operational state of smaller distributed energy resource installations is affecting resilience in the near term.

In addition, the study found that a lack of industry-wide guidelines and standards is hampering action to increase utilities’ resilience to the effects of severe weather on the grid. Utility executives said their top-ranked weather concerns for network resilience include very high winds (23%), flooding (17%) and winter ice and snowstorms (15%).

Amol Sabnis, a managing director who leads Accenture’s transmission and distribution business, said, “In the long-term, utilities can promote greater resilience by linking the benefits of major investments to grid-modernization strategies to convince policymakers, customers and other stakeholders of these benefits.”  But COVID-19 is increasing the urgency to address resilience, he added, noting, “It is raising new questions such as, in the event of massive catastrophe how do we support the repair crews, feeding and sheltering them while meeting COVID-19 safety needs? What are the best technologies to protect employees’ health on the job, such as temperature scanning, social distancing and air monitoring?”

“The answers will require the industry fully teaming up, but with people and technology, we will get there,” Sabnis added.

Research Methodology

Accenture’s annual Digitally Enabled Grid research evaluates the implications and opportunities of an increasingly digital grid. For the most-recent research, Accenture surveyed 206 C-suite and senior vice-president-level executives at electric utilities in 28 countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong), Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The survey was conducted online from November 2019 through January 2020.