Impact of Extreme Weather on Planning and Operational Practice of Power Distribution Grids

Nation's power grid is constantly facing extreme weather-related outages including the most recent Texas (2021) blackout. Power grids in coastal regions are more vulnerable to hurricane-related events. For example, hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria left more than 7.5 million residents in various coastal communities in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico without electricity. Utilities in those areas are constantly adopting new technologies and strategies at different stage of planning and operations to lower the impact of extreme weather on power outage. Similarly, the R&D community is developing tools and methods useful for power distribution utilities for enhancing the service reliability during the extreme weather events. In this context, this panel proposes to bring together experts from utilities and R&D community to disseminate experience learned by the utilities in managing distribution grids during the past extreme weather events, and to share the state-of-the-art methods and tools valuable for the utilities in managing the power distribution networks during those extreme events.