Extreme Weather and the Power Grid: A Case Study of Winter Storm Uri

Nov 24, 2024·

Baldwin Nsonga

Andreas Berres

Robert Jeffers

Caitlyn Clark

Hans Hagen

Gerik Scheuermann

· 1 min read

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Abstract

Weather can have a significant impact on the power grid. Heat and cold waves lead to increased energy use as customers cool or heat their space, while simultaneously hampering energy production as the environment deviates from ideal operating conditions. Extreme heat has previously melted power cables, while extreme cold can cause vital parts of the energy infrastructure to freeze. Utilities have reserves to compensate for the additional energy use, but in extreme cases which fall outside the forecast energy demand, the impact on the power grid can be severe. In this paper, we present an interactive tool to explore the relationship between weather and power outages. We demonstrate its use with the example of the impact of Winter Storm Uri on Texas in February 2021.

Type

Conference paper

Publication

In IEEE EnergyVis 2024: 4th Workshop on Energy Data Visualization

The top portion of the image consists of two parts: a map of Texas counties (a) and a list of counties with purple bands indicating outages (b). The map is colored in different shades of purple (outages). Some counties are outline in red, and the ERCOT boundaries are represented by a green line which encompasses most counties. Below the band chart, a diagram shows generation shortages and load shedding (c), and at the bottom, a line chart shows temperature over multiple weeks (d). The bottom left shows several sliders and other UI elements. — Sample analysis using the OutVis analysis tool. (a) shows the choropleth map of the outage data for a selected state at a specific time, with an optional temperature data overlay. Users can select counties in view (b) and highlight them with red outlines. The Texas Interconnection boundaries are displayed in green. (b) displays the temporal outage severity for every county of the state. Counties can be sorted by severity at the specified time (black bar). The red bar indicates the threshold of the n % most affected counties, as selected by the user. (c) shows power generation shortages (pink) and load shedding (orange) and (d) displays the median temperature over time. Finally, the tool provides data exploration options (e) to select the time range, the specific time, the aggregation level for severity, or set the threshold to automatically highlight the most severe outages, control of temperature overlay in (a), and state selection.

Last updated on Nov 24, 2024