Grid resiliency against extreme weather

DNV provides evaluations and recommendations for grid hardening and system resiliency against extreme weather.

The last decade has seen a significant increase in extreme weather events, with major implications for asset owners and grid operators. Such events can affect the loading, efficiency, and failure rate of components. In turn, high failure rates may increase the likelihood of overlapping outages, with the risk of them spreading and cascading.

DNV has a wealth of knowledge and practical experience to support you in preparing for and reducing the impact of extreme weather on your power systems. This covers:

• Increasing system hardening and ride-through (i.e. minimising the amount of damage caused)
• Improving resilience to extreme weather events (i.e. minimising the impact of any damage)

Our expertise in power system design and operation for extreme weather is built on best practices gathered from around the world. These include emergency preparedness and ride-through for all types of conditions including floods, winter storms, wind storms and hurricanes, heat waves and dry spells.

In addition, we have developed dedicated technical and financial tools to assess the likely impact of extreme weather and recommend optimal resiliency measures.

Services and reports

• Field audits and initial damage assessment
• Mitigation plan development and implementation
• Reviewing standards, specifications and materials
• Review of pole / tower performance and recommendations for upgrades
• Pole attachment audits and pole loading analysis
• Recommendations on hardening of circuits which feed critical loads and load centres
• Recommendations for and fine-tuning of system designs for quick restoration
• Review of design and construction practices and standards
• Review and recommendations for
  • vegetation management
  • flood hardening
  • undergrounding of circuits
  • black start plans
  • system restoration plans
  • training system operators for severe weather contingencies
• Re-examining circuit arrangement and locations
• Location and design of switching and automation around planned and potential dynamic microgrids to enable resilient islanding
• Applying smart grid technologies to enhance system resiliency
• Situational awareness
  • review and recommendations for visualisation in real-time, early-warning systems
• Emergency preparedness plans and philosophy