Climate change risk assessment method for electrical facility

Abstract

It is gradually recognized that the global climate changes are likely to profoundly affect the global energy sector, which powers the world's economy. The energy sector provides the electricity and fuels that propel the economy, including commerce, manufacturing, transportation, communications, healthcare, water supply and treatment, and other critical infrastructure and systems. It becomes clear that the climate changes have potential for disrupting normal economic operations and quality of life. In addition to efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that may cause climate change, it is recognized that adapting to and preparing for climate impacts cannot be avoided anymore. Among the various energy sources, electricity infrastructure is indispensable to daily life and is vulnerable to many natural disasters, such as earthquakes, extreme heat, thunderstorms, high winds, ice storms, and floods. In order to investigate the relationship between the climate changes and electrical facility, it is necessary to assess the risk for climate changes in terms of major types of climate change hazards. Currently, there are a lot of activities to provide regional and localized information and insights to support assessing risks and developing effective resilience strategies for electrical systems that are vulnerable to climate change impacts. In order to resolve the limitations of conventional spider web chart and control chart method, this paper proposes a weighted spider web chart method, which supports overall climate change risk calculation and different weights on climate change risk metrics. The main objective of this paper is to present the general weighted spider web chart model and investigate the usefulness and applicability of the proposed weighted spider web chart model through the strength-weakness-opportunity-threat (SWOT) analysis.