Enel Foundation and EPRI launch climate resilience workshop series

January 24, 2022

Enel Foundation (EF) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) are teaming up for a new virtual workshop series focused on electric sector climate adaptation to strengthen electric grid resiliency. As countries around the globe accelerate mitigation through decarbonization to reach economy-wide net zero by 2050, the adaptation challenge must be systematically addressed at the same speed to ensure resiliency.

Significant weather events that used to occur once every 100 years are now happening with greater frequency. These events can threaten the safe, reliable, and affordable delivery of electricity. The joint EPRI, EF technical workshops, which begin this winter, will address numerous key topics including physical climate risk assessments, potential vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies and technologies across system assets and resources, and implications for grid operations and planning.

“The climate has already changed, and modern energy systems have shown a high level of resilience to climate-related threats due to the reliability of their electricity grid and progressively decentralized generation,” said Carlo Papa, Enel Foundation Managing Director. “We are honored to cooperate with EPRI on these workshops, sharing best practices, informing the debate and promoting adoption of new strategies to address energy sector resiliency.”

“With extreme weather events occurring with greater frequency, electric utilities need to adapt to ensure consumers have an uninterrupted supply of power. We need to understand how the power system could be impacted by the changing climate conditions,” said Daniel Brooks, vice president of Integrated Grid and Energy Systems at EPRI. “EPRI looks forward to partnering with EF as part of this key workshop.”

Upon completion of the joint technical workshops, EPRI and EF will issue a white paper summarizing key findings and identifying future research priorities.

This work builds on recent EPRI leadership focused on resource adequacy and resiliency efforts. Earlier last year, EPRI announced a new industry-wide initiative, bringing together grid operators, utilities, researchers, and other key stakeholders to help them prepare for and incorporate extreme weather considerations into assessment and planning tools, and jointly plan resiliency improvements across communities and the associated energy systems. Additionally, in the summer of 2021, EPRI solidified its relationship with the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to collaboratively enable improved resilience/reliability of the North American electric grid.