Abstract
With climate change, heat waves have become more frequent and intense. Rotating power outages happen when the power supply is unable to meet the cooling demand increase resulting from extreme high temperatures. Power outages during heat waves expose residents to high risks of overheating. In this study, we propose a novel data-driven inverse modelling approach to inform decision makers and grid operators on planning rotating power outages. We first infer the building thermal characteristics using the connected smart thermostat data, and used the estimated thermal dynamics to simulate the thermal resilience during a heat wave event. Our proposed method was tested for the California power outage in August 2020 by using the open source Ecobee Donate Your Data dataset. We found in California the power outage should not last more than two hours during heat waves to avoid overheating risks. Informing the residents in advance so they can prepare for it through pre-cooling is a simple but effective strategy to expand the acceptable power outage duration. In addition to assisting power outage planning, the proposed method can be used for other applications, such as to evaluate a building energy efficiency policy, to examine fuel poverty, and to estimate the load shifting potential of building stocks.
Highlights
Heat waves happen when abnormally high outdoor temperature lasts for several days [1].25 As one of many consequences of climate change, heat waves have become more frequent and 26 intense [2][3]
The recommended allowable power outage duration was determined as the maximum period that less than 10% of households are exposed to overheating risks
Heat waves pose new challenges to energy security and public health as they drive up electricity demand and expose residents to overheating risks
Summary
As one of many consequences of climate change, heat waves have become more frequent and intense [2][3]. Heat waves are considered to be a critical public health threat, and they were estimated to be responsible for the death of more than 70,000 people in the summer of 2003 in Europe [7] and 55,000 people in Russia in. Heatwave-related excess mortality is expected to increase. Extreme high ambient temperature drives up electricity demands and poses. 33 threats to grid reliability, because higher ambient temperature leads to increased cooling loads. The atmospheric warming in California is 35 expected to increase grid peak demand in summer as much as 38% by the end of twenty-first
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