Quantifying the System-level Resilience of Thermal Power Generation to Extreme Temperatures and Water Scarcity

Severe weather events, such as extreme temperatures and water scarcity, can have significant impacts on the operation of critical electrical power infrastructure and, consequently, pose major threats to its resilience. Differently from existing studies that focus on the impact of extreme weather on individual power plants, this article quantifies the resilience of thermal power generation to extreme temperatures and the different levels of water availability from a system-level perspective. This article starts by introducing the fundamental engineering models of thermal power plants’ cooling systems. A system-level quantification methodology is then proposed, which also introduces a multicoordinate resilience-oriented metric that assesses system vulnerability through the concepts of conditional value-at-risk and its rate of change in response to changes in the considered weather conditions. The numerical results obtained using a simplified version of the British transmission system not only demonstrate that the proposed framework is well suited to quantify the system-level resilience of the test system to extreme temperatures and different levels of water availability and scarcity but also highlight the benefits of using the newly defined resilience metric in such studies.