PNNL

New reliability standards are addressing the impact of extreme weather across sectors and systems (e.g., electricity generation and transmission systems). These standards aim to address vulnerabilities caused by extreme thermal events—such as heat waves and cold snaps—that can impact system reliability, especially when combined with resource variability or sub-optimal cooling conditions for thermoelectric plants.

However, there has been a lack of consistent support for utilities and other planning entities in defining benchmark events and no platform to access and analyze those events across regions or illustrate the uncertainties in characterizing them—until now.

PNNL’s Extreme Events Reliability EXplorer (REX) addresses these technical challenges, easing the burden the new standards place on planning entities.

Challenging standards for planning entities

The new standards require entities to define extreme weather benchmarks based on past extreme heat and cold weather events or future meteorological projections. These benchmarks are meant to establish baseline scenarios for import/export across regions and for assessing system performance under extreme conditions. Entities must also conduct periodic assessments to evaluate the wide-area impacts of extreme weather on the bulk power system, including steady-state and transient stability analyses to model various scenarios (such as resource availability and diverse geographical impacts during extreme events).

The standards also emphasize collaboration among planning entities within defined energy management regions to ensure consistency in assessments and mitigation efforts. This coordination facilitates a shared understanding and consistent implementation of reliability measures across regions.

How REX helps

PNNL’s REX dashboard provides innovative access to libraries of extreme events and their underlying datasets and associated models. The goal is to help planning entities (utilities, investors, system operators, and regulators) learn about extreme event characterization and to assist with a coordinated selection and documentation of events across regions.

REX resources

To explore REX’s capabilities for yourself, visit the extreme event explorers:

• Temperature Extreme Event Explorer
• Hydropower Drought Extreme Event Explorer (in development)
• Energy Drought Extreme Event Explorer (in development)

The REX team also provides access to several datasets:

• Libraries of extreme thermal events
• Coincident temperature-load-wind-solar dataset associated with the Western Electricity Coordinating Council Anchor Data Set 2023 infrastructure and load (coming soon)

The REX team

Nathalie Voisin   Principal Investigator	Casey Burleyson   Co-Principal Investigator	Micah Taylor Dashboard Team	Rachel Michaels   Dashboard Team	Heng Wan   Thermal Event Libraries
Nino Zuljevic Data and Software Support