Hurricanes and Power System Reliability-The Effects of Individual Decisions and System-Level Hardening
Authored by Seth D Guikema, Gina L Tonn, Allison C Reilly, Chengwei Zhai
Date Published: 2017
DOI: 10.1109/jproc.2017.2689720
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Abstract
Hurricanes produce significant, widespread, and often prolonged
electrical- power outages. For example, Hurricane Irene caused more than
500 000 Long Island Power Authority customers to lose power and it took
eight days to achieve 99\% customer restoration. Individuals and
businesses are heavily dependent on a continuous supply of electricity.
Given this strong dependence on reliable electricity, individuals and
private industries are increasingly putting collective pressure on
regulators to require system hardening by utilities. In some cases, this
has led to utility action. Conversely, many customers install a backup
generator to guarantee electricity supply during disruptive events.
These actions taken by individual customers affect their experiences in
future storms, and are generally influenced by individuals' strength of
preference for reliable power, their beliefs about the likelihood of
losing power in the future, and the outcomes of their most recent
experiences. However, individual action may come at the expense of
collective action, whereby those who buy generators, often those with
more resources available to purchase the generator, do not participate
in the collective grievance, reducing the demand for overall system
hardening. By using a validated power-outage forecasting model in
conjunction with an agent-based model, we characterize how a community's
likelihood of losing power in repeated hurricanes is affected by the
complex interactions among individuals' behavioral responses in whether
to engage in personal or collective action
Tags
Agent-based model
Simulation
Risk
Evacuation
data envelopment analysis
Climate-change
Flood
Mitigation behavior
Behavioral response
Electric-power outage
Outages
Interruptions