An Approach for Justifying and Prioritizing Adaptation Investments for Climate Resilience

Justifying and prioritizing investments to improve power system climate resilience is challenging due to long time frames, deep uncertainties, interdependencies across systems, and competing objectives. Decision-makers need practical guidance on how to account for these factors to confidently determine whether adaptations are needed and if so, which adaptation strategies are cost effective while still achieving the desired level of performance. This paper provides an overview of methods to compare and evaluate adaptation decisions, focusing on the assessment of robustness of decisions through sensitivity analysis. A synthetic case study of an electric power distribution system is used to demonstrate this approach, highlighting the tradeoffs present when considering high wind events, the damages and power outages that can result, and the benefits of several different adaptation strategies to reduce the adverse consequences of such events. The approach presented here is demonstrated in detail for one hazard and only for distribution system assets to ensure the results are interpretable and fit the constraints of this paper. However, the same principles apply for broader system analysis, with the computational load growing as comparisons need to be drawn across multiple hazards, additional adaptation strategies, and interdependencies among system components and operations.