A Comprehensive Review: Impacts of Extreme Temperatures due to Climate Change on Power Grid Infrastructure and Operation

TL;DR

This comprehensive review analyzes how extreme temperatures induced by climate change—specifically heat domes, polar vortices, and icing—affect transmission, distribution, and substation grid equipment. It catalogs failure modes, monitoring methods, and mitigation strategies across equipment classes, and assesses standards readiness while identifying gaps that could hinder grid planning and operation under future climate regimes. By presenting failure/influence and cascading diagrams, the paper translates vulnerability insights into actionable considerations for contingency planning and reliability. The work highlights the need to revise standards and enhance climate resilience through better monitoring, design adaptations, and coordinated protection schemes. Overall, it advances understanding of how extreme temperatures challenge grid reliability and outlines concrete directions for research and industry practice to bolster resilience.

Abstract

The power grid is experiencing a multi-fold transformation while the global climate evolves with record-breaking extreme temperatures during heat domes, polar vortices, and severe ice. Over the decades, these extreme temperature events have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity. The power grid infrastructure is geographically spread over thousands of square miles with millions of small and large components, and the impact of extreme temperature operations on the grid infrastructure needs to be researched further. This paper reviews academic literature, standards, industry articles, and federal reports to identify the impacts of heat domes, polar vortices, and icing on all the T&D grid equipment, including substations (assets owned and operated by the utilities and independent system operators). This paper classifies the equipment into primary and auxiliary equipment and determines its vulnerability to extreme temperatures for a deeper analysis of a more critical and vulnerable set of grid equipment. For each equipment under consideration, its fundamental role in the system, the impact of extreme temperatures on its operation, available monitoring, and mitigation of these impacts are discussed. The paper develops insights on standards readiness and identifies gaps concerning extreme temperature definitions. The paper also develops summary tables to identify the critical failure modes for each type of equipment, failure influence diagrams, and cascading influence diagrams to highlight and aid in translating the equipment vulnerability information into power grid contingency definitions that need to be considered in grid planning and operations.

Figures (31)

• Figure 1: Interdependence of critical infrastructure on electricity doe2015quadrennial
• Figure 2: Map of high-voltage substations (light orange bubbles at terminals of the transmission lines in the map) and transmission lines in U.S. hifld_1
• Figure 3: Heat wave characteristics in the U.S. over the past six decades heat_wave_stats_1. Frequency is the average number of heat wave occurrences. Intensity is the average temperature (in $\degree$F) above local threshold during heat waves. Average duration is the average length of annual heat wave season in days.
• Figure 4: Temperature map of a heat dome over the U.S. on August 23, 2023 hifld_2
• Figure 5: Simulated heat wave frequency over Northwest America zhang2023increased