[ad_1]
With extreme weather and natural disasters becoming increasingly intense in a changing climate, a group of Georgia Tech researchers investigated how the recovery, guided by common FEMA and industry policies, varies depending on the severity of the disruptive events. The study, a collaboration with National Grid, used large-scale data analyzes to examine nine years of power outage data to better understand how quickly power grids are coming back online for customers.
The study found that 90 percent of customers experience 10 percent of the total downtime of a disruptive event during moderate to extreme storms. However, the recovery degrades with the severity of the disturbances. Large outages that cannot recover quickly increase by 30% in moderate to extreme events, while small, prolonged outages dominate overall recovery processes.
The Georgia Tech College of Engineering study examined 169 weather-related power outages in two service regions in New York and Massachusetts. The failures were caused by a wide range of disruptive events such as hurricanes, northeast, thunder and winter storms from 2011 to 2019, affecting nearly 12 million people.
A feature article, “Large-scale data analytics for resilient power failure recovery services», Is published in Joule: Cell Press.
“Our goal was to use large-scale data from the operational energy network to better understand resilience,” said lead author Amir Hossein Afsharinejad, PhD. studying in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Using such a large data set spanning nearly a decade, we investigated how recoveries respond to the severity of a wide range of weather-induced failure events. “
Georgia Tech’s analysis reveals that restaurant service behavior follows a “law of recovery scale.” This law restores service to the majority of affected customers at the cost of a small fraction of the total downtime. This prioritization policy, however, becomes less effective, exemplified by large power outages that cannot be prioritized. This results in customer downtime that is 47 times longer for moderate to extreme failure events.
The study found that prioritizing recovery does not optimize recovery from small failures, which dominate delayed recovery throughout the course of an extreme event.
“These results tell us that typical services governed by the priority recovery policy come at the cost of disparity, and the cost is significant when failure events become severe and extreme,” said Chuanyi Ji, co-author of the study, associate professor of Georgia Tech. and Afsharinejad thesis director. “Our analysis shows both the capacity and the fundamental limitation of recovery as part of the prioritization policy, where fast recovery does not support severe and extreme failure events. “
The research team also explored whether other approaches would be more beneficial in speeding up recovery from failures. One included distributed generation and storage. Their initial study found that the approach was well suited, as speeding up recovery of a small fraction of large failures in the non-priority category can reverse degraded recovery from moderate to extreme events.
The data used in the study is commonly available for most distribution network operators in the United States and other parts of the world. The researchers hope their work, which took more than four years to analyze, demonstrates that energy service providers have the ability to embrace data science and transform their own data into new knowledge to improve both performance. recovery and improvement of infrastructure.
“We are heading in a direction where severe storms are getting more costly,” said Robert Wilcox, senior engineer at National Grid and co-author of the article.
The team is excited about the future direction. “This is also a historic time, as more and more consumers need data and machine learning to help improve energy services and smart infrastructure,” added Wilcox. “I hope our study will motivate the industry to use the data to better understand the issues we face today and in the decades to come.”
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top 10 public research universities that develops leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers degrees in commerce, computer science, design, engineering, liberal arts and sciences. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main Atlanta campus, campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a premier technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the country, conducting more than $ 1 billion in research per year for government, industry and the society.
[ad_2]
Source link